


In Remembrance It Shall End

by LittleDesertFlower



Series: And so the timeless tales spoke of a riddle and a ripple: [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Allusions to death, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Decontextualized Spoilers, Displays of Anger, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Historical References, Other, References to Canon, Season/Series 04 Spoilers, Season/Series 12, Tenderness, Time War (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 75,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28131846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: Brainwashed, she’s an ally to the Time Lords. In order to restore her memories, he must pretend to still be her enemy. But all is lost to him. He’s never known how to play his part if she won’t be trying to convince him to join her side of the war. And all she wants this time is to turn him in.
Relationships: The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Series: And so the timeless tales spoke of a riddle and a ripple: [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1908595
Kudos: 4





	1. Prologue—Old Enemy

**Author's Note:**

> There are no obvious spoilers here aside from a fic-long s4’s take on the Time War, and a s1-s10 canon recap told in very vague terms on Chapter 4.
> 
> However, if you’ve seen Series 12, the parallel between the ending of that series and the main driving element of this fic is not hard to miss ^^ 
> 
> Of course, the main characters and one specific secondary character are taken out of s12, although their stories are not directly following s12 canon.

_The Master has come a long way. To the desert, home to few species and refuge to memories he hasn’t dug up in years. Soon, the dunes will melt into air, little grains of sand floating around metal beasts, and he will abandon his own planet by the hand of the enemy, his ally._

_The worst enemy is the one a few steps behind him. The enemy he’d always had to look in the eye, face-to-face, time after time. An old friend who keeps trying to meddle for the worst, his eyes changing, glistening with more and more of that terrible and inborn wickedness every time one of the Master’s own Dalek ships crashes against the protected domes of the Citadel._

_“What do you intend to do with that?” he asks, turning around to nod his head at the click of the one gun in the Doctor’s hand. The gun that shoots at Dalek and Time Lord both, if need be. Worn by time, by decadence, and by amorality, the Doctor is ready to kill. Not because of anger, not even because of a choice. And he does not stop at piety or mercy. His gun does not falter, because the Doctor of War will not rest until the war is… not won but over._

_“What I have to!” The Doctor’s voice is coarse when he answers. What ever made it so? Ash and time. Silence. “No less.”_

_All the history between them spent to come to this. To the moment when the Doctor raises a trembling hand to point that gun at his old friend, at his old enemy. And the Master can only laugh in his face._

_So many chances has the Doctor thrown away before, because of the pity in his eyes, and the memories in his hearts, still burning coals of something that died years ago and kept dying over and over with each body they both rode to the end. The Doctor always threatens and never delivers, not even halfway. Not even during the war to stop his oldest enemy from betraying their race, their planet, and their history._

_And it is such a pity. Because the moment has never been more right._

_The Master snorts. “You never could. Not you.”_

_“I will do it. I will kill you if you stand in my way. I have to do it, I have to end this.”_

_Bouts of laughter, full of dark amusement, follow._ Empty threats in an empty desert _, the Master thinks,_ so very fitting for this _. Such a lovely end, for them. They’ve toyed around it often enough, here and there, in both their playing grounds. If the only way to stop each other is to kill, and kill successfully is something they never follow through with, then they let each other go. They dangle, hovering over the dislodged jaws of death, and call it a barely exciting game to play during the most lonely and boring decades._

_The Master just turns his back on the Doctor and tries to walk away._

_“This… I do without choice,” comes the mutter from behind him._

_The echo of the gun will haunt them forever._

_The Master falls, like the Dalek ships, against the red dust of Gallifrey and the ashes of its children—and he just keeps on laughing._

_This is who the Doctor is, in the end. War is on the brink of fading out, the Daleks about to pull away with a final attack, the Time Lords ready to declare their measures of false peace, and the Doctor’s choosing the present moment to be murderous._

_Beautiful, murderous Doctor._

_For a murderous Master who laughs at his own death._

_Because this is who the Master is. Someone who finds enmity and finality hilarious, even while bleeding on the ground, aware that this regeneration will trap his body inside a Citadel until his charm finds him a way out. It’s just a coin he doesn’t mind spending._ Beautiful, murderous Doctor is worth it. _As the cackles take over his breath and heartbeat, the Master doesn’t realize his youth or his foolishness at spending the currency of his life on something as useless as a flimsy, a whim to see his old enemy twist his soul into becoming a little bit like the Master himself._

But of course, back then, he wouldn’t have realized it, regardless. The Master of War had understood nothing.

* * *

Why. Three-year-olds ask this question incessantly to their parents, grasping answers out of gaps in space that seem otherwise undisturbed of knowledge and wisdom to a casual observer. Researchers, scholars, travelers dedicate their lives to the fundamental mysteries and treasures of the quest, rather than the answers themselves. Ordinary people throw the word lightly to the wind in the hope that a kind entity will take it upon themselves to mold their doubts into fully formed thoughts, their problems into solutions, and their failed stories into functioning plots.

The Doctor asks why so that she can torture herself with the truth.

_Why did you leave Paris burning?_

_Why did you return to report you had failed?_

Once she’d come back, the Council, sheltered in their artificial darkness, had their own why to ask out loud. From superior to soldier. Simply, without ornaments or flowery sentences.

“And you say she remains untraceable? Even to you… Is there any particular reason for this?”

A reason for her failure in a mission that she had previously sold to them as basic and straight-forward, practically easier done than said. But she had to come back. One more minute there, in the fire and its consequences blurred by smoke and unclear devastation, and she wasn’t sure what she might have done or for how long she might have stayed.

She wasn’t sure if she would have come back empty-handed and with a different truth to tell than the one escaping her lips now.

“I wasn’t able to pinpoint an exact location. The Master knows how to hide well in time, even from me. It will take longer than that to find the right time frame. However, I do have at my disposal a narrowed-down list of places and times where my luck might change considerably.”

The high table had nodded at her, content, apparently, with progress that only sounded as if it was so but really isn’t. Her presence only welcome briefly among them, to share relevant information and take orders, she left at once. But the question… the question had nagged at her. Three letters that had grown larger with every step she’d taken away from the Council.

_Why did you lie?_

She could have turned back at any moment, calmly, and decided to just change her mind. A few words would have done the trick. The authorities on Gallifrey had never been in possession of the brightest minds. She would have been able to convince them new information had come through right as she’d first exited the room. She would have been able, with some new clothes maybe, to pretend she came from another time, some other day.

Instead, the Doctor had found herself putting distance between the whys in her head and the duty chasing her, propelling her in every direction but forward.

* * *

It is hard to find moments of quietude on this city. Harder than it used to be when she was a child. In the distance, far from the protective shields around the Citadel, smaller concentrations of people fall prey to Dalek attacks that, rumor has it, are under control, yet no actual forces are applied to stopping. Not that long ago, she was out there, somewhere unsafe and unregulated, giving her lives for the planet in too many places at once, against too many foes that the Citadel neglected to face. Now she’s hunting an enemy she can’t get rid of, and hunting him poorly.

The one good thing about this bubble, a thin curved veil that shows in every direction the eye can see, is that it has numbered down Gallifrey’s enemies to just a bunch of desperate Daleks who cannot ever retreat back to Skaro.

_And yet you’ve let the person responsible for every death those Daleks bring upon the innocents of this world walk free._

Beige and orange, out there, glimmer in the winds of the desert. If she looks at the dunes for too long, she will begin to remember shapes, scenes on them, of times when war was still a fantasy to the Master and her. They carried guns because it was in the rulebook, they used them because it was part of the training, and they made pledges to never harm those undefended, those innocent, and those in need.

She hates who they have become. Children of the Time Lords. Children of war. But they were never children. They were bred to hate the foreign, not defend it. Taught to presume others guilty instead of innocent. Instilled to take away well before they learned how to _give._ Children of injustice, condemned to repeat it unless they swallow their pride, their training, and just listen to the injustice unfurl, let it turn them into people who fight it, not spread it.

_You let him walk free,_ the Doctor says to herself. _While Gallifrey awaits the flames. While Paris burns._

She knows, because she asked the TARDIS to show her, how many people were living on Paris before the fire. How many people will one day return to find their homes destroyed, their livelihoods annihilated. He might not have killed directly, but he has aided injustice, masterful at its impartation.

_There might not be a siege if Paris burns,_ she realizes, her stomach sinking, taking her hearts down with it.

It’s one thing to mess with history, one another entirely to brave up to change it from its very foundations into a new thread in the tapestry of time.

When she goes back now—and she has to—, it is not just him she will have to deal with, but history’s restoration. A task that she may have undertaken, in the past, as a hobby, and with someone by her side. Alone, what might she do? And why? Why, why, why? Who has all the answers she’s seeking? All those answers at the tip of her tongue, right between her hearts.

Once, she let him walk. So she could think. _Why did he evacuate the city? To change history?_ The greatest damage he could do, the greatest, cruelest anachronism to humankind which may incidentally result in millions of deaths in the future.

The second time, however, she will do the job she was called to do. And she will do it well. There has never been anything but war in the Master’s hearts. War and rage, desire for destruction. That is what he brings, what he makes. If not upon the world, he calls it down onto her until he’s sufficiently pleased with the fractures it causes inside her.

All those things he said, there were mere distractions. They had to be. It’s what he does, talk and talk and talk, distract her from what he knows, so that there is a point in which all she knows is that she no longer understands. Not him, not the situation, not even herself.

The Doctor breathes in deeply, her hands tucked into fists by her thighs. She turns back from the wall-wide windows of the private room she snuck in after the Council meeting, and she hurries out of it without even bothering to close the door. On the way through the narrow corridor, a woman in the ample golden and red robes of the sisterhood of Karn bumps onto her shoulder. Both glance at each other momentarily and, as the Doctor continues striding up ahead, she hears the woman sigh in a lamentation improper of the brief encounter.

“Oh, Doctor…” the woman says. “What did they do to you?”

The Doctor turns around to meet the woman’s eyes, but finds no answer in them. Just more questions. Prophecies, past oracles and their recorded madness, she never quite believed in all of that. Yet her lungs stretch out, caught halfway in a breath that doesn’t make sense, and she struggles to articulate one thought, just one.

_I don’t think I… understand…_

She wishes she just meant the sister’s words and not something larger than herself, growing inside in a hole that will one day be too little to contain it.


	2. Like the Maid of Orleans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be gentle with any anachronisms and mistakes I might be guilty of after this. Even after a lot of surprisingly enjoyable research, I’m very much not a historian. That said, a few details may have been indulgences. Please forgive those, too. I am just a small gay, trying to get by.
> 
> Lovingly dedicated to Väl. Anything Middle Ages will always and forevermore remind me of her. Even crossovers with fandoms she doesn’t participate in.

A shadow emerges from one of the hidden crooks and crannies between corridors.

“You have returned.” Gat shows her face in the light of the sunbeams filtering in through a window panel.

The Doctor barely nods at her in sign of acknowledgment.

“Yeah,” she replies to Gat. “Not for long. I still have to find—”

The Time Lord engineer chuckles sarcastically by her side.

“Did you just come back to announce your own _failure_?” Gat says, unimpressed.

The Doctor stares down at her.

This engineer makes occasional appearances before the Council table sometimes, yet never to say much on matters of strategy, only to take her orders as the Doctor takes her own and then comment something to her on their way out. Today, though, she was not where expected, right at the exit of the big Council chamber to catch the Doctor as she left.

“Gat, is it?” she says. Gat knows to be quiet until the Doctor goes on, calmly and without losing her steadiness. “I’m very thankful for your cooperation, and your team’s. But your involvement ends there. Do I need to make myself any clearer?”

Gat remains behind her, unmoving, for a moment. The Doctor has reminded her who stands higher on the Time Lord hierarchy, and the grey areas as to how little she can actually choose to belong to that hierarchy get lost in translation. Her childish whim to fit in is unmatched by her wisdom that the Council is unfit to rule fairly and, by fitting in it, so would she. Then, as the moment passes, Gat rejoins her a few steps further on her way to the TARDISes port downstairs, where the Doctor’s awaits to take her back to Paris.

“Involvement in what, exactly? Did they pull your rank and call you home—the hero of so many impossible stories—just to have you fly spirals around a local hermit gone rogue?” Gat taunts her. “What of the Daleks, the most direct threat for those enjoying no protective shields under the dome of the Citadel? Is no one directing you to fight _them_? To find _them_?”

The Doctor actually turns around in order to face her now. She sees a frustration in Gat’s eyes, filtering in as well through her tone; a frustration that is more truthful than her more apparent sarcasm might let transpire. And that is worth stopping on her way for, no matter her hurry.

“So far? No,” the Doctor answers just as honestly. “I imagine the Council wants me pushing the Master into disabling the bubble so that your team can prepare us to face the Daleks in a proper battlefield, not trapped in here as we are.”

Gat glances back at her. There is a hint of something new in her eyes that she tries to hide with a truth that the Doctor herself has to make conscious efforts to ignore, because if she doesn’t, it stares right at her, and it burns at her retinas like the suns.

“That could be done _now_ ,” Gat insists. “Bubble, no bubble. The Daleks are here _now_ and the Master is gone. Why waste time trying to obtain information that will get the bubble destroyed and a thousand fleets called down upon us? Why, Doctor?”

That question, again. The Doctor pinches at the bridge of her nose.

“I have no interest in finding the Master just for the sake of it,” the Doctor replies, and she hopes her honesty will not waver now. She wants to have meant that as much as the rest of it. “But this bubble _is_ the reason the elite can keep themselves safe while the towns suffer without the Citadel’s protection, keeping the Daleks busy. Bringing it down… will bring equality, at least. If not equity.”

Equity is a word Gallifrey has not known or has had applied to a life on the planet in many, many years.

“Many more might come, Doctor, not just the Daleks, when the bubble falls and word gets out. We are not ready for that.”

“You’ll make us ready.”

“And what of the children?” Gat asks pointedly, as if this had been a question asked before that the Doctor somehow had failed to answer then, too. “If you confirm the Council won’t do anything until the bubble falls and a thousand deadly races lunge at the planet, then someone must take matters into their own hands, wouldn’t you say?”

It’s asked quietly, peacefully, casually. As if it were just a thought, spoken to never be considered again. But that is just for show. In the corridors, it all must be, unless it’s deathly important for it not to.

The Doctor exhales. She has too much on her plate already, all of which piles heavy on her shoulders. The children on Gallifrey, the children that are bred to one day fight these wars on behalf of the elite safe on their domes in their silly little collars and red capes. Every step she has taken across the copper deserts, every gun she has gripped and shot lately, has been for those children. So that the people they will eventually become won’t be as terrible as who she grew up into, grew up surrounded by.

“The Council never actually acts, Gat,” she says; she… confirms. “It’s someone else getting their hands dirty under their orders. Does it change anything if this time there are no orders, just someone’s will to act freely?”

She stares right into Gat’s eyes. She thinks she knows now what is being discussed here, softly and without drawing too much attention to the matter. She chooses to think that somehow, Gat’s unstated, unspecified proposition might be more legitimate than her being sent out into the unknown for a local hermit and a local myth that she’s not even sure she can catch in time for it all to make sense.

_Why?_ She wonders as she leaves Gat behind. She volunteered, but… _If I wanted to delegate now, focus on the Dalek problem, would they let me?_ Does she have any choice at all except to venture the ripples of time and discover it herself? Has she, ever?

* * *

A foot soldier contemplates the slopes descending onto the walls of Paris, the city that one day will take over the hills, the forests, and the towns nearby, and a foot soldier must be quiet in their assumptions that it is a dead city they are approaching. The columns of fading smoke conceal the towers on the gates all too well; only the taller heights of Notre Dame pierce the gray skies, miles away. Buildings like that have not suffered in these fires, and they won’t for some time. It’s the dwellings where large families share poor meals and work, surrounded by their own waste and that of their house animals, that have been reduced to little more than shaky structures and ash. On the contrary, neither the Burgundian headquarters nor the future command center for the French resistance have been harmed. Stone doesn’t erode as fast as wood.

Horse hooves pound on the way to the empty city, where if one looks hard enough, long enough, the silhouette of a man might appear for a time, skipping around on top of the walls. But the army at the back of the small entourage where the future king, the dauphin of France, rides marches on their own feet, bearing the weight of their own weapons and armor, and hardly anyone can keep their heads up that indefinitely. Just one, the Doctor.

“Do you believe it is true?” one of the generals asks future king Charles many paces ahead, as part of the entourage which the army silently follows, only ever echoed by the rhythmical footsteps of their every stride. “The news from Orleans?”

“I have no reason to imagine otherwise,” Charles replies affectedly. “Our victories precede us, it should not come as a surprise that a generous, anonymous benefactor has chosen to warn their legitimate ruler of the situation here in Paris.”

“It certainly does look uninhabited and unoccupied,” says a soldier with choppy, uneven black hair next to the generals. History will know that soldier for things so much more important than hair, if the Doctor does her job right. All her jobs, one after the other in a procession that never ends. “But I would not trust appearance, not now.”

Charles laughs softly, a little louder than his usual snicker so that the sound carries well over all that surrounds him.

“What use is Paris to the Burgundians in such a state?” he says. His smile recedes on his lips until they’re but a straight line. “No… Times have changed, finally. First Orleans, now this… Gentlemen, France is being reconquered by those who should have never lost it.”

Behind the entourage, the Doctor cannot help but agree, if not because of the reasons Charles himself might think.

She adjusts the strands of her back scabbard, as the weight of the longsword is beginning to make her muscles sore after the long walk from her TARDIS into the chaos of the army, and she sighs, her eyes lingering on the Paris city walls. It is hard to see anything properly in the last dashes of smoke, since the fire is finally dying out, but she is so sure sometimes that he’s still there, messing with her even in the distance, just wishing her nearer.

When she gets there, when the French invade the city they are too early to reconquer, and history is made right in small ways, he will wish she had never come. He will wish he had never toyed with the possibilities of a Doctor ready to steal a sword from an army and infiltrate thousands of men using perception filters so she won’t be judged by the body she last regenerated into. He will wish she had never anonymously informed the French that Paris was burned and now lay empty, ready for them. If he wants to play games of war, she will bring the real thing to him on a silver platter and sever his own head to present to the Council, back at home, on an actual platter, when he has delivered the information they need out of him.

This time she cannot fail herself in doing this.

In the early hours of a long morning, the armies of France advance on the northern gates of Paris, feet covered in the mud and dew of the countryside. Her own boots have been ruined, the elegant wear on the black fabric of her tux caked with remnants of dirt and drizzle. Even in June, the weather does not forgive those that walk under sky unprotected, far away from home. This is, after all, Earth before industrialization and yearly heat waves.

“Quiet…” Charles comments, staring up at the giant stone gate. The wooden door that normally would keep travelers on the other side of the city has been opened ajar, and between the fog and the smoke, nothing much can be deciphered in the shapes behind it except a nebulous void. “Eerily so, wouldn’t you say, general?”

Mutters of uncertainty are passed along the troops as the horses huff air out in the cold.

“Either everyone is dead inside or a trap awaits us past the gates,” the soldier with chopped black hair replies.

“Perhaps your informant was telling the truth, after all,” a general says. “Paris has fallen under fire and no one remains.”

“The Burgundians?” another one asks.

Charles advances quietly on his horse, barely a few clopping paces onto the stone-paved way that reaches out to the gate.

“Why would they burn down a city they have control over?” he mumbles.

Why, again. The Doctor makes sure to have a good grip on her sword. She agrees with the black-haired soldier. This is all too easy. Paris under siege was never so. Years went by until it was fully under French reign, and many died. One day in June is not going to change that, even if especially designed to _change_ some things. The impossibility of that is—

_Many_ will _die today,_ she realizes, _if this is a trap._ History will remain changed, if the wrong strands of it are pulled, and the death count will still be glorious. To him.

It’s two birds with one stone to him.

At last, the Doctor unsheathes her longsword from her scabbard. A few soldiers around her stare in confusion. No orders have been given, but she doesn’t need them, especially not now.

“So you bring me an army…” The figure, the silhouette, purple on dying orange and fading gray, emerges from the clouds of smoke, clapping in the echo of Paris. “Well done, _very_ well done.”

Charles’s horse neighs, steam pouring out of its nostrils.

“Who are you?” the dauphin asks, loud into the upper walls.

“Sorry, did you think—” The Master laughs. “No. No, no. I couldn’t care less. Still… if you’re add-ons, all the more fun for me to play with you, isn’t that right…?” On the ramparts, he turns slowly, his face a frozen smirk, and he raises a hand, commanding a silent force to move forward out of the gate into the fields surrounding the city. He’s still biting down on a much shakier giggle when he bellows, facing the entire French army: “Burgundians!”

They gush out the northern gates like water out of a fractured dam. Men on horses, bearing lances, swords, and shields. Their yelling thunders over that of the French, as soldiers of the land attempt to get their bearings and their dauphin retreats back into the vastness of his army. The clash of both forces, enemies and conquerors of different sides of Europe, shrilly reaches the Doctor’s ears every time metal hits metal.

She wields no armor herself, no shield, just a sword over half as long as she is tall. And with it she breaches a way to the gate, hacking down Burgundian after Burgundian who come at her, who see nothing but what they choose to see, and yet fall on the fields anyway. Because she is much more than appearance, and much more than she herself even knows to project on the world.

Every man down is a reminder. It goes on, it always goes on. Here or elsewhere, the war is something she lugs around, inside, like a curse or a choice. Every man is a relief that she’s one step closer, and a weight getting heavier, because she should be looking down on them and _feel,_ yet she doesn’t even care enough to remember. They’re just numbers, and they could be history.

“Hello, Doctor,” he says, from atop his safe wall, as a city he destroyed awaits the destruction of the people that might grow to populate it again. “Do you like my new friends that I made just for you?”

“Do you like mine?” she shouts up at him.

Her sword drips with blood. The white on her shirt is no longer so.

He twirls on the ramparts.

“Very much so,” he says. Then, softer: “I knew you’d come again.”

It is not hard to walk her path, man after man, until she makes it past the gate. After all, the Burgundians are busy kicking down French soldiers, looking for Charles VII—or the man who will one day bear that title—, they don’t give much thought to her, a single person, ascending to the walls from the inside of the city, without a bow or arrows to pose any threat to them once she has climbed all the way to the top. Up there, it would be so easy, to just push him off, cut him short of a life, and drag him to the TARDIS across a battlefield and a forest. Her duty would be to do exactly that.

But he keeps playing with something, with the full purpose to destroy, and expecting her to restore it, because they both know someone has to now. She knew he was testing her in his own quietude, whether the test was on her resolve, her nerves, or something else only he can decipher. A test that would last until his next move.

This is his move. Moving history further up the line and ruining it with death and chaos— his trademark—so that she can witness it and suffer for not being able to stop it. Except she will try. And she’ll die trying.

_I would have, before. Duty comes first. His head. His body. His bubble. All of that comes first now._

She has to remind herself, before the fire in her hearts grows larger than the one that burned down Paris, and she approaches him with the intent to shove and murder. The intent that shouldn’t be there, because other emotions coexist at the same time to be the perfect foil for it, for the same nonsensical reasons. A void, inside, that she lugs around in a heavier fashion than war, perhaps.

This time, none of that can matter more than the Council getting their way so that Gallifrey can be free of a Time War. It can’t. For the people dying in it, for the people losing years to fighting it. For herself and the pull that calls her to run away when she can’t, when she will never deserve that peace again.

It’s his fault now that she cannot even steal it. He’s forcing her to continue fighting, to continue being the bearer of atrocities, and the self-awareness she has of every day she has borne them is something she can’t bear on her own shoulders while reaping peace.

How can a longsword be heavy in her hands, when her hearts have been lead pumping lead for centuries?

“I’ve been watching you, you know?” he says. “Nice equipment. Not very fashionable for you, but when have you been fashionable, eh?” His chuckles, warm, not sarcastic, throw her off. “Where’s your armor? You’re going to get killed without it, sooner or later…”

He draws a weapon, very similar in length and girth to hers, from his belt, and she momentarily wants to laugh at the fact that he’s commenting on her lack of protection when he’s as unprotected himself in that purple jacket and those pants that don’t even reach his ankles.

She lifts up her sword, defiant, and takes a few steps forward, trapping him between the smoking abyss and the sharpness of her blade. The Master eyes her, guided not by the innocence of a gazelle about to get lion teeth into its neck, but the perversity of a predator preparing to pounce.

“It’s been a while since we did this,” he says. “You sure you can beat me? Is history worth it?”

“I’m not doing it for—” The Doctor lunges at him without warning. “— _history._ ”

He stops her easily with one elegant move, then steps far enough away from the sword’s reach, his eyes not leaving hers as she regains her breath.

“No, I know. But it is, historically, your weakest point. Someone messing with Earth. I like being the one to mess around in your preapproved neatness. You always come when called. Or, well, provoked, I should say. You have no idea the kind of problems you’ll get into for that… Isn’t it time you learned, sweetheart?”

“Stop calling me sweetheart!” She strikes at his chest this time, barely regretting what might have happened—the explanations she might have had to give—until he’s dodged her. “Come back home with me. You don’t need to do this. What’s it all to you? Nothing! It never was.”

“You’re right on that front. None of it ever meant a single thing to me. You did. _You always come when called._ Stop coming, you’ll start winning. But why do you keep coming? Ever stopped to wonder that, hm? Ever stopped to think about that hole in your head, in your chest? What it means? What it does?”

He can’t know. All of this, he can’t. Her sword is swift in her hands as she swirls it around him. Every step she takes, getting him closer to the edge, is a step he is ready to regain in her direction, pressing his own longsword against hers, making them crash and scrape up together a friction for the ages.

“Whatever it is you have planned, it’s not going to work,” she hisses, so close to the union of their swords she’s actually afraid she might cut herself on the edges if she’s not careful. Her teeth, she bares to him as an equal threat on her part. “I know where you are, I know how to win in ways you’ve never even dreamed of, and however long it takes, I will be here to stop you, to take you back, and force you to end the war with me.”

“The Time War in a bubble,” he says, longingly. “I am really sorry about that, you know? But there was nothing any of us could have done. The alternative was… heartbreaking.”

“ _I_ ’ll break your hearts!” The fire of rage fuels a concentrated hit at his chest. The longsword moves too fast for him to intercept this time. It digs itself into his purple jacket, the checked waistcoat underneath, and yet reverberates with the sound of something metallic that only ever has the flames inside her effervesce.

He spins his sword with a flick of his wrist, yet keeps the sharp point of the weapon down as they circle each other like beasts.

“I’ll let you,” he says. “Break me all you want, it’s all you ever do. I’m going to stay here, I’m going to let you come, and I’m going to continue existing, standing in your way, letting you _see._ Because it’s all I’ve ever known how to do. And it’s all you’ll ever let me be… for now.” That ‘for now’s is all the much darker than everything else he’s said, and it’s what reeks of the hole, the void that pulses with the unravelling mystery she’s trying to put together in her head. “It’s always a dance, just like this one—and don’t tell me you don’t play along with me, because you do. Sure, I could give myself in, end everyone’s suffering by doing the right thing. But you could just as easily let me go. Have you ever thought that maybe I’d stop if you did, first?”

She wills herself not to listen to any more. He’s just walking in circles, navigating the best way to access her space, the mental as well as the physical, and if he takes another step, he’ll make it. She has to act now or she will lose. But if he’s wearing plate armor to shield himself from her, it’s going to be more complicated than letting rage take over and guide her. Premeditation against his cunningness.

He can’t have protected all of his body. And, in his arrogance, he most certainly _hasn’t._

In a breath that doesn’t quite reach the hidden corners of her, the Doctor grips her weapon well. The next thing he knows, he’s clutching his right arm, and a trickle of blood—red, thick, vibrant—is dripping on the fabric of his jacket. So she was right…

“You’re not getting away this time,” she says through gritted teeth after the effort and the speed it takes to move, to land, and to retract before he can have enough time to react.

“Oh, sweetheart…” he mumbles instead, past the pain, the blood. “Last time, I didn’t. You did.”

For a moment, she’s convinced this is it. She has cut deeply, hard enough that it will take days for that to heal even with the right sort of medical attention. And the Master will not waste a regeneration on it to speed things up, not if it means one less life to play with.

Then he emerges from his own injury, grabbing the hilt of the longsword and staring right at her, as he strides towards her, fearing nothing, not even a second cut, a second wound that might debilitate him further. When he comes at her, when he raises a sword longer than half of her and lowers it faster than she can blink, he does it steadily. Over and over, as if nothing had touched him and nothing ever could again. The true Master reveals himself in a cloud, past the mask of impossibilities. He cannot be defeated until he yields, until death forces him, and the Doctor is only an obstacle in his path to victory. An obstacle whose arms will not hold indefinitely, forever, if the rest of her might.

Swords clash, feet meet, hands battle for dominance of space that belongs to neither, until the final blow is delivered, and the Doctor’s sword flies off her sweaty fingers to the stones of the ramparts, and she falls.

His breathing overpowers the raging combat between civilians and soldiers, kings and rulers, below on the ground. Now that she lies, her back on the stone, and has his sword pointing at her, across whatever space and distance separate them, she can actually see the fate of the game churning in all directions. The same game they always played. Playing it, not playing it. Does it even matter? He finds ways around the rules, and he always wins in the end, despite however long they end up playing one against the other, because she’s right, she can’t not show up to get him. Not ever, not even to let things lie and move on. If she ever stopped, he’d keep going. That’s his game.

“Go on, then,” she says, chin up as she glances at him. “End it your way. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.” She even nods at him, realizing the parallel cruelty to having it happen like this, and the beauty, she supposes, for him to choose it be so. “You’re owed. Twice.”

Her eyes fall closed. He will kill her next, watch her body dissolve of itself into a new one, and thus make her pay for the death he suffered at her hand earlier. It is what she deserves, perhaps, for daring to cross that line in the sand that they never really did. Even though the chances were many and the threats to do so many more. She supposes, in the end, they have always been heading towards this. One murdering the other for what one believes, the other retaliating in the same way, for their own convictions.

“RETREAT!!!” sound the horns of the French army, so very far away in her head; as do the horns of many horses, galloping away, and the men running to catch up with them. “Retreaaaat!”

The smell of metal and blood around her fades, and she opens her eyes in time to see.

“It ended a long time ago, Doctor. For the both of us. And, deep down, I think a part of you knows that better now, here, than when you killed me.” The Master removes the sword from the collar, her neck, and curtly nods up at her, indicating she is allowed to get back on her feet, if she so desires. She remains unmoving, below his powerful, ever-changing stare. “I want to believe that, anyway.”

Compelled by the side she fights on and their call for retreat, the Doctor gets back on her feet. She doesn’t keep her eyes anywhere but on him for the brief moment it takes her to recover her sword, a few feet away. Not even as she recoils back to the stone stairs, into the shadows and smoke.

He shouldn’t be letting her live. Not for a game, not for history, not for the slightest devious plan he hopes he will be victorious in. None of those have ever included letting her live after having the cusp of her life in his hands. They did always make sure neither could ever have that, because they both always knew they would never be strong enough to deal once they did. And he has been the first to hold the possibilities in his very hand and throw them away. She’s had him at the edge of his life plenty of times, decided to end it for Gallifrey, for the glory of something already dead, and for two eight-year-olds that died too long ago in the midst of all that.

Blood continues to drench the fabric on his arm, his fingers have wrapped tight around it, tearing the sleeve off now that they are not fighting anymore. His eyes have not left hers, but he isn’t the predator anymore, and neither is she. When she turns her back on him to go back to firm ground and disappear in the crowd, she can be certain of one thing, regardless of how much confusion it instills between her hearts: he will not follow, nor attack, not even say a word.

The Doctor descends the stone steps without turning back. She manages to reach a group of French army soldiers, runs along with them back towards the forest to join the rest. It is then that she dares look back at the wall, at the gate, where the Master still stands, barely a shadow now, and yet unmoving, blood still dripping, as he watches her leave.

And she could swear, even at this distance, it’s not revenge or deviance that he exudes, but something older than the both of them that hasn’t existed in their confusing star-crossed history in too many years to count, to remember, or to even consider.

She shot him.

He could have skewered her and hasn’t.

Confusing history is all the cards she has been dealt to play with.

But she doesn’t believe for a moment it has ended. Not before and definitely not here, now.

_It never ended. It can never end,_ she reminds herself, teeth gritted hard.

* * *

The wisest move would be to find a tent and a blanket for the night that is to come, but she has no time. She never has any time at all except the one given to her as a gift to untangle and fix for someone else, which she then gives up entirely. Every second of a long life is borrowed, owed, and to be returned one day, when it all ends, truly ends. When skies fall down and species perish, maybe her gift to the worlds in those falling skies will be to perish with them.

Even though Charles isn’t king yet, his tent awaits her well within the camp. From the decent outskirts of it, avoiding the animals parked outside, the soldiers resting and making time until the gathering inside is concluded, the Doctor can pick up enough of what’s being said.

“On nightfall, the army will march again,” a firm, warm voice is saying from the constraints of cloth on the other side of the tent.

“You shall lead them,” Charles says.

“They will meet their end, sir,” one of the generals replies. “The city will be yours.”

“Not until it’s crawling with people anew,” Charles says. The sound of his steps inside the tent echo even outside, as does the metal of his sword when he moves. “But I must admit a shell of a city is better than nothing at all. I trust you with this.”

His voice gives away that he is not addressing the general this time with those final words.

“The Lord will provide,” the same warm voice as before states firmly.

“Yes. He always does,” Charles agrees. “Through agents of good on this world, the Lord always provides, in the end.”

They go on to discuss, in muttered terminology, their plans for their next move. Nothing too elaborate, and everything as the Doctor supposed they might, guided by what she knows of these events in a past history. Trying her best not to appear as anything but another soldier reduced to a shadow under clouds and sun while battles are planned, she disappears into the buoyant activity of war preparations.

One could easily forget the world in a camp still being erected from the ground up. Too many shapes of stimuli encompass the entirety of the air that is no longer so, the second manure piles in corners, fires are being lit, and the odors of hundreds of soldiers combine into a thick paste that one only ever meddles through in a fog almost as dense as the atmospheric condensation of the morning. The Doctor finds a long line for the few civilians picked up by the army on their wandering on the country to get some blankets for the night. Across from her, a wet-haired woman tries to hand over to her a steaming bowl of something as well.

“Thank you,” the Doctor says quietly, looking at the line get longer behind her, “but save it for these people. They need it more than I do right now.”

The woman eyes her curiously, but says nothing. After all, it is a soldier everyone sees in her, and soldiers, however low on the hierarchies of the military, stand on different lines and huddle around fires with their own kind, unconcerned with foreign civilians because it is enough to worry about their lives and those of their families back at home. The Doctor wonders how many of these civilians waiting, left behind in this camp for night to fall and end, lived in Paris before or in cities destroyed out of the same malice. It always repeats itself, that history of malice, no matter who first lights its spark. _Or where…_

At a poorly shaped log pretending to be a seat, she watches the dauphin’s tent until dusk. Whatever their final decision on strategy, the dice were cast in the paradoxical space between times, and both she and the Master are counting on the numbers, the same numbers. He would meet no resistance, if he tried the camp, not even while recently wounded. He could be anyone, he could be preparing a bomb outside the dauphin’s tent right now, or silently ruining any one of their weapons so their next offensive against the Burgundians will be in vain.

So many ways she can see of having the known traces of reality explode that keeping an eye on reality itself might be the only way to spot the big explosion before it is set in motion.

She rubs at the back of her neck, where the tensions of the day—and so much more—have accumulated and won’t seem to dissipate, especially if she won’t take off the back scabbard, and she will not as long as this lasts. She holds her head in her hands and muffles a long sigh.

“You alright there, love?”

At once, her head shoots up to find, not an enemy to react to, but that she’s simply being talked to by the same woman as before. She can’t be older than forty-five, and yet she looks… infinitely more worn, more experienced in her outer shell, than the Doctor has in her objective infinity.

“Love?” the Doctor repeats in a mutter, almost to herself, as she tries to relax her shoulders and back.

No one here is supposed to _perceive_ anything in her worth calling her ‘love’ for, not even tiredness. Soldiers don’t get approached like this, in their full armor, their hair all wet in both rain and sweat, their eyes pools of exhaustion. They’re just expected to bear what is understood to be their duty. And this is hers.

“Can anyone be alright?” the Doctor asks back, in an attempt to sound humorous. “At a time like this?”

The woman hands the same bowl from before over to her.

“You won’t be, that’s for certain, on an empty stomach. Hunger rarely wins wars.”

“On the contrary…” the Doctor says, accepting the bowl, reinvigoratingly warm in her hands. “It’s always the hungry and the unprivileged that rise and fight to win them, while kings and politicians and nobles take the credit, leave their mark on history books.” She sighs. “But yes… if armies didn’t fight while hungry, the outcomes of war would be… very different. If people weren’t hungry, if they were cared for, then maybe there’d be no need for wars, after all.”

The woman laughs.

“You’re not from around here, are you?”

The Doctor smiles fleetingly at her and nods.

“No,” she says, honestly. As honestly as she can without lying nor telling the truth. “I come from very, very far away.”

“There’ll always be wars,” the woman says, serious, solemn, “no matter if no one goes hungry, because as long as people still own palaces, travelling by carriage and ship, having more food that they can ever even consume, they will always want more castles, more horses, more vessels, and more countries to their name. And what will we have? Food on our table, a roof above our heads. Enough that we’re not dying, but will we be living?”

The Doctor listens, then asks:

“Why travel with the dauphin’s army if that’s the future you see? Why feed the people following him?”

“I live in the world, love. They might fight each other over titles, but it’s our homes that get burned down in the process. I’m just looking to find a new one here. When it’s all over.”

The woman sighs and nods at the Doctor’s bowl.

“Eat it now, before it goes cold, eh?”

She leaves dragging her feet down the path she came. The Doctor watches until she’s gone, unable to shake the feeling that somehow there was something familiar about her, that somehow this could have been _him_ , again, and that she just let him go, again. She’s about to get up and chase after the woman, but the next breath she takes manages to return some sense into her head, and the notion, impartially considered, becomes but a silly thought drowned in the chaos all around her. She almost laughs. The Master would never understand humans well enough to impersonate one this perfectly, let alone discuss the experiences of one of their wars with her. He’d have been too stupid, as well, to risk it like this for no reason other than to play a game.

In the new comfort of a blanket and some stew, the Doctor awaits nightfall, until the black-haired knight emerges from the main tent with the generals, heading towards the horses to gather the army and ride. It is time. Her hearts beat faster in accordance when a purple shadow moves in the corner of her eye, trailing that knight silently, hiding. The Doctor leaves both bowl and blanket behind on the log, for someone else to find. She’s got work to do.

It’s time for her to keep the Master from intervening further in history. Most importantly, and by the looks of it, from irrevocably meddling in Joan of Arc’s military history as she is to lead the attack against the Burgundians, like it was dictated to happen in September, 1429—now, chronologically still months away.

Any shadow chasing after a knight close to Charles in a war camp would be suspicious of ill intent these days. But this is _her_ shadow, bearing scents of lands too far away from Earth for anyone else to so much as recognize. She glides carefully under the starry sky as he navigates the mud, always a step behind his prey yet a step ahead of everyone else.

_What are you waiting for? Come on…_ The Doctor rests uneasy in her own hiding spot. He should have come out right now, to grab at her in front of everyone and announce his plan, like he always does, so it’s pointless and ridiculous but hurts twice as more to have let him get away with it. _Where are you?_

Her short black hair trembling in the wind, Joan gathers by the rest of the knights, communicating the orders and the plan in quick whispers, and wastes no time in heading back towards her own horse. The wind picks up, stirring a few lances poorly placed on a chest by two tents in the dark. The Doctor’s hearts skip two beats, one each, and Joan instinctively walks between the tents to pick up the lances, set them back on the chest.

The Doctor quietly unsheathes her longsword. It’s a comforting weight in her hand. She will cut him down. His stupid, pointless plan with Joan of Arc will earn him nothing else.

_If you so much as touch her,_ she thinks, _I will destroy you._

A voice coming from the void between hearts, the fog in her mind that she can’t decipher or get through to, replies. _And if he doesn’t?_

She needs him alive, but she doesn’t want him alive. She doesn’t want history corrupted by him, but she craves the release of _frustration_ towards him, and that can only happen if he does corrupt it.

Somehow, the whole of her knows this is his fault, and only his. The bubble, her void, and this. It’s an unalienable truth that drives her closer to where he is, to where Joan looks all around her in confusion the second before a pair of hands emerge from the shadow, before so do the words that stop the Doctor on her tracks, because they are not in any way the paving stones to any plan, stupid or not.

“Don’t be afraid…” the Master says calmly to Joan of Arc.

She stares at him, her armor glistening when the light of a very distant torch hits it. So many sources spoke of her as connecting with the divine, maybe she will think him an envoy of her god. And, like many gods, he will unleash his old rage onto her before she can understand divinity cannot ever be kind in their profoundly old and selfish age unless a conscious effort is made, polished out of the inherent malice in their power.

“I mean you no harm,” he tells the Maid of Orleans, the woman who joined an army of men for her country and beliefs and died alone, burned thrice, for them all. He tells her as if he _knew._ As if somewhere in his rotten, selfish hearts he _cared._

Joan’s hand moves to her sword at once, although she does not grip it still. She keeps her chin up as she stares at this stranger that has visited her in the night.

His eyes, pools of secrets and change, of darkness that shifts like the day and the night have for the age of the Earth, for the age of the universe, appear wet in the torchlight when he lifts a hesitant hand towards her.

“Please…. Don’t be afraid, Joan.”

“How do you know my name?”

He doesn’t say. He can never say, if he knows. He simply reaches, finally, for her temple, and closes his eyes.

“Who are you?” she mumbles.

“Misericordia,” he replies simply. She goes limp in his arms. He winces when he has to hold the full weight of an armored human being, yet soon recomposes his expression and, to himself, mutters: “What I should have been years ago…”

Quickly, he lifts her up into his arms, biting his lip hard from the pain it must have shot into his shoulder, and walks away into the dark where he came from.

The Doctor follows. The least she can do is wait him out, then undo whatever he has telepathically done to Joan in the silence of the night. It’s his game, but she chooses how to play it. He might be aware of her following, he might have kidnapped Joan of Arc in this manner, out in the open, so she would see and get intrigued enough to go after him. Deep down, she knows she’s proving him right, coming when called, when provoked. But she can’t leave history with a blank bearing his name.

Again, he’s acting against every rule he ever wrote, every rule she chased him for through the centuries. It never ended. It can’t end now that it’s so difficult. Now that the rules have been scattered across the dirt, impossible to find, and that she no longer knows what clue she is following, or if she is indeed following anything at all, other than just him.

If only it were as easy as to just hold him down, pin him against the mud, and have him confess to every single thought he has ever had. If only she could access the recesses of his mind where he hides his evil. His deviance from what they were both taught to live by. Maybe there she would find hints of what brought him to deviate from that, as well, and walk a road of his own making, for purposes only he might understand.

That, at least, has not changed. They exist in a perpetual cycle of uncertainty, messes, and history. Both personal and foreign. And all she wants, all she’s ever wanted, is to let it end, one way or the other. But it’ll be many lives yet before it can. And many wars.

_So why did he say it ended long ago? Why isn’t he calling attention to himself now? Why didn’t he just kill me before?_

All those answers swirl in the same corner of her mind, and she is sure somehow they might be spotted in the same corner of the horizon, whenever they will be, just not now.

Getting out of the camp proves easy enough with the army preparing for an attack, too busy to look where they should. It’s the relentless pacing out in the open, in the dark, through trees tall as the sky and the grass which taints her black pants with remnants of humidity, that feels like a few eternities could be contained in liminal spaces such as this one.

The Master hobbles slowly past it all, without a single hurry. She can hear him breathe with difficulty even many steps ahead of her. At some point, he has to dig a knee on the mossy ground, head bending forward, and he lets out a muffled yell into the night.

It shakes the core, fogged up and empty as it is, inside her.

He would never have done that in front of her, knowing she was watching, not even to pretend and play his role,. Playing weak was something he always left for her to do, as he awaited the big moment when she rose in front of their common enemies and showed them the transformation from feigned weakness into the true terrifying force of the Doctor while he was her sidekick and audience at once.

They could have been so much…

But it all ate him from the inside out.

And she let it, because she’d been afraid of the powers at work inside him. More afraid than she ever said, than she can ever say. The noises of war, he’d said. They’d been so little, she hadn’t wanted to believe. All their lives, she watched it eat away at who he was, she let it take him from her, and did nothing, blamed him instead when he became a rebel to rebellion itself.

Then war had come, and she’d heard her own heartbeats come alive in the obliterating sounds of death, and she thought she’d understood. She thought she could understand the rage, the thirst for more, for revenge that never sates that thirst. Until he stabbed her in the proverbial back and ran from her a second time.

_My oldest friend, my oldest enemy…_

His feet crunch against the French forest. The Doctor watches him and she thinks, for a moment, that if she walked up to him and offered him a hand, just this once, for a single moment of truce, he might thank her. He looks so very tired, as they both did in the olden days, before it all started and he became death itself. Its portrait and its despicable side.

In time, thoughts and steps take the Doctor, the Master, and Joan of Arc to a small cabin covered in colors that are no longer those of wood, nature having taken over for man-made creation a long time ago. He hurries inside, his breathing uncontrollably heavy now, and comes back out to sit outside against the paneling, to look up at the few patches of sky that the trees let him see.

_Misericordia,_ he’d called himself to Joan. There is something merciful in stopping battles quietly, without anyone noticing, the Doctor must admit. Something that stretches beyond her own definitions of mercy, something that has landed them both here now. But how has he even grown to comprehend that? Has he really just induced sleep into the Maid of Orleans’s mind, let her miss her call to arms into Paris?

From her own shadows, the Doctor remains concealed until the Master removes himself from the cabin and, dragging his feet, putting pressure on his shoulder wound, disappears into the foliage.

Only then does she dare venture into the small clearing where the cabin rests, immobile, as atemporal as her, as him. The door creaks under her fingers when she pushes it open. Barely enough space stretches everywhere once she enters, a thin flat cot raised half a half foot off the floor, and Joan of Arc lying on it, untied, unharmed, her side rising with her every breath.

The Doctor stands at the door, unable to move any closer. Joan of Arc, like most heroes of history, regardless of whose history, are untouchable even to other heroes. She has been called that in her own time, she supposes it would apply here, now. Joan rose in a time of struggle to defend something despite the ties of tyranny and the rules of sovereignty in a society that let her pray for the soldier to become a victor, but not fight to grow into victory herself. To want to destroy that, for the sake of a game or even for the sake of a plan…

What good does it do to stop it now? With her around, _now_ is only a manner of postponing it. There will always be a tomorrow, with the Doctor. If there isn’t a battle by Paris tonight, tomorrow, next week, next month, in the same manner as the once-siege in a September that now will never have happened, as long as Joan of Arc is alive and well, as long as the Doctor is to make sure of that, Paris will stand as a fixed point in the Hundred Years War.

And the Master _must_ know that already. He must be aware of the grave mistake he has made, not killing Joan cleanly now. Kill a known martyr in the 15th century, so much art goes blank, never created. So many people jobless, cut off from resources, from recognition. The legend of a woman standing out, gone from a world that needs women to rise in every century. In keeping Joan alive, safe, however far from the battle she is to lead, the only thing he’s doing is leading the Doctor towards restoring his sloppiness into a new history people can remember one day.

Ripples into ripples, into waves so mighty tsunamis never get a word to describe themselves because what would be the point?

Slowly, the Doctor steps onto the cabin. She stands near the cot, and her hand, shivering from everything but June chills in the night, hovers over Joan’s shorn black hair, the small red birthmark near her ear. Somewhere in that head there’s answers, a trail better lain for her to trace backwards and forwards than actual footsteps on mud in a forest.

And she doesn’t need to press her mind into it. It erupts like a wave at her, giddy like water coming from a fountain, jumping onto the air to meet it for a second, then disappear back into the form it came from.

“You’re just asleep…” the Doctor mutters to herself. “Just… asleep. He didn’t take anything from you. All your memories are… intact.”

The word _memories_ dances around in Joan’s mind, crystalline. It touches her own, and it frizzles, sizzles like fire dying on frozen tarmac.

This makes it all so wonderfully easy, so stupidly so, that she can’t do it. What does he gain from all of this? Keep a known hero asleep for a few nights, safe and sound in a cabin where he can hunt and gather for her, and then what? Does he think Charles will just forget about one of his best soldiers? Does he think he can _change_ that much, just by changing a little? One battle today means nothing if there will still be a battle tomorrow, especially if the Master himself seems to have command of the Burgundian forces.

She sighs. That was always so easy for him, too. Just as it was easy, relatively so, for her to fix what he broke. It’s people’s lives being played with, the collateral damage that burns and burns and never gets looked back at again. She owes it to them to try to restore the pieces he couldn’t quite annihilate.

Her mind coils into the crooks and crannies of Joan’s and, piece by piece, she gives her back her awareness and one thought, just one. By the time Joan is sitting on the bed, disoriented and with little to go on but that thought, the Doctor is nowhere to be seen by her. She keeps an eye out for her as Joan exits the cabin carefully and, following the Doctor’s own mental trace, loses herself in the forest quickly, quickly, until she’s running fast and away.

_Run,_ the Doctor thinks. _Always the best piece of advice to give, receive, and commit to._

“Well, this has been fun, we should just do it… for _e_ ver.”

To her right, she turns and catches him, carelessly waiting for her to discover him, lounging as if he had been there all the time.

She points her sword at him before he can say another word, before she can think to muster her own at him. Her breath rests heavy inside her chest for a while, as she keeps her sword up in an attempt to threaten him with both weapon and her own presence, yet he remains quiet, leaning on the cabin’s wall with an open palm—his left, so the right arm will be relaxed and unhurting. His head lolls forward a little, and it becomes clear from his posture, not shifting even slightly over the seconds, that he means to go nowhere, that he’s not chasing Joan back to keep toying with her head. He doesn’t seem fazed either, in his defenseless state.

When he looks up at her, his eyes freeze any morals of duty that may existed within her, echoing words in old Gallifreyan said to her about war.

“Now, will you stab me properly? No cuts. Clean pierce through the chest, between the hearts. That’s where the bullet went, last time.”

The Doctor frowns. Last time… A puncture between the hearts brings a painful death. She had never before wished him something that promised so much and such long agony until the end. Not even in her darkest moments. Not even now.

“Will you make me bleed? Bring me home, be a hero? Did you want to be their hero, all these years? Crowned victor of the Time War? The favorite child of the Council…”

The longsword remains between them, perfectly still. If she walks any closer, if she presses it further, it will reach his chest, his checkered waistcoat, his dark shirt. She grits her teeth until it hurts her jaw, and pushes it deeper. The tip of the sword not biting through skin and cloth is only ever a warning, a reminder. For now.

“You know all that,” she just says, as calmly as she can.

He fought her so many times over the title of favorite child. As it turned out, none of them ever had what it took. One brought hell down on the planet, the other dishonored it by escaping it and making a name for herself in the borders of the universe. It’s that name Gallifrey wants now, not her true name. No one speaks that now. Doctor is all anyone knows, it’s all she chooses to hear.

“Now you answer me this,” she continues. The sword digs a little more into him. “What are you plotting?” She changes the angle of the future stab so that it hurts him more once it’s coming from above, slightly enough so. “And save yourself the lies! I know full well it’s got nothing to do with the French. Or even home.”

“I can’t tell you that. Sorry. You’ll have to stick around and find out for yourself.” He giggles to himself. “It’s going to be a good one, Doctor.”

Her face grimaced into the purest expression of rage, she almost presses herself against him, until her breath is more threatening near his neck than the sword, now lowered, which could have stripped him of the hearts he needs to live.

“You could have killed me, held me hostage. But you didn’t. Why?”

This time his laughter has an excellent tone of sarcasm that only ever forces her closer until her free hand’s wrapped around his shirt collar.

“Still think it’s funny, do you?” she hisses.

“That you finally learned to think like a master of war?” he says, looking deep into her eyes. Brown and hazel. She wishes he would just feel like she wants him to, scared or intimidated, even thrown off his game. But no… he revels in it. “Never been funnier to me.”

A flash of something very far from amusement, very removed from his pose and his stance, trying to convince her of his thorough enjoyment, pools in the back of his gaze like droplets of thick ink flooding a room little by little.

“You know, Doctor, we _really_ could do this forever…” he mutters. “But aren’t you tired? Don’t you just want… to run? Away, so far away. Into the horizon where nobody could ever find you? Why follow what they tell you to? I thought you were free.”

Suddenly, she remembers.

“I still live in their universe,” she says. “I still fight for the world they’re destroying, for the people living in it that can’t fight or run away.”

“Good. That’s good. You still know how to listen—”

She gapes at him for a single second.

“—that was _you_ , you wretched—”

Patiently, he interrupts:

“So _listen._ ” His hands rise to gently hold her wrists, the wrists about to get a grip on his neck if he goes on talking much longer. “I’m not the solution to this, sweetheart. Not in the ways you’re expecting me to be.”

From below, the sword comes at him, at his chest again, and without any preamble, harder than before.

“Why aren’t you killing? Me, Joan of Arc…” she asks again, controlling her breathing. “What are you doing with all of us?”

He shakes his head slowly, and he almost looks… disappointed. His hands drop to his side again.

“Is that what you want, Doctor? You want me to kill for you? Kill, kill, kill. My legacy for you to retrieve from my own ashes. Let it be so, then, if it will make you happy.”

He presses something, some button, concealed under his sleeves.

The air swallows him. No particle is left behind. She clutches air, she stabs at air. And she screams as she heads back into the forest, hacking at branches and grass alike. To get back faster, to stop him. To stop him like he stops her.

In front of her, the air regurgitates him… and France’s future king, by his side. The Master holds him, a knife to his throat, well pressed against it so Charles cannot move without getting more than a scratch on it. Another arm keeps the dauphin’s hands immobilized at his back. However well the poor man has been trained, this is no situation he can easily get out of.

The Master chuckles in his ear, loudly so she’ll hear it as well.

“Is this what you want of me, Doctor?” he asks. “Because, my, I wonder what happens to Earth if I murder one of its important kings _in cold blood_.”

“It’s alright, Your Highness,” she says to the dauphin. “Just… try to… keep calm.”

Charles shrieks unintelligibly. The Master shushes him as if he were a little child that has been disobedient.

“Now, now, what did I tell you about screaming, huh?” he says, gently caressing the knife against Charles’s throat as if he were a barber. Charles trembles visibly under his touch.

“I know it’s hard, harder than anything you’ll ever do,” the Doctor continues. “But please remain as calm as possible. I can promise you that this man will do nothing to you.”

The Master glances up at her.

“You can be sure of that… how exactly?”

“If you wanted any of them dead, what’s stopped you so far?”

The Master snorts.

“I’m sorry? Didn’t you see the Burgundians? What a nasty lot those are… Who do you think kept them on the loop about Paris?”

“They still absolved you of the responsibility of _killing_ the resistance yourself, didn’t they?” she says. And the more she talks, the faster she thinks about it, the clearer it appears, the thought, forming in her head like a prism of light. “And you didn’t burn Paris either, you just set fire to a couple of buildings, let it die down on its own, while the entire population had been evacuated way before. By _you_. Where’s the legendary Master that made _me_ fear what he’d do next?”

“Aw, you fear me?” he says. But she can hear it in him, he’s no longer as cocky. “So nice of you.”

“You didn’t kill Joan either. Even though it would have been the sensible thing to do, if you wanted this war over quickly and definitely.”

“Who said I did?”

“So why are you here? What are you doing in this war, toying with strands you’re leaving halfway plucked out of their correct timing?”

“I told you,” he just says, and he shrugs. “It’s not my fault you never listen.”

“You haven’t touched a soul, which is very much not your style.” She frowns. “Now you threaten the future king?”

Charles squeals again when the Master digs the blade of his weapon well into his throat until a few drops of red fall onto his clothes.

“Didn’t you want death?” the Master says. “Death, I will give you.”

His smile matches that fear she spoke of, that fear she should have of him, but she’s just so _sure_ now. Why keep her waiting? When has he, ever? It’s one thing to parade his desires in front of her to annoy her, another entirely to hold everything in, especially when she’s showed him how unannoyed she is by it.

“Go on, then. Do it,” the Doctor says, finally. A gamble. Her greatest, perhaps, to let a man’s life hang between what she hopes, what she wants to believe, and what she is terrified of. But if Charles had ever been in danger, she’s _positive_ the Master would have murdered him very, very long ago.

None of it makes any sense, except this. The Master’s not killing, and whatever his reasons, something’s off that’s keeping him in France. Something he’s already told her that she isn’t getting yet. Something unrelated to this war. Something related to _their_ war?

“You’d let him die like this, now, would you?” the Master mutters sweetly. “An innocent death on your conscience.”

That’s all the answer she needs. The Doctor throws her longsword away. It lands softly on the grass.

Charles’s screaming has now transformed into plain old wails because he knows in his heart nothing can be done. Because the soldier he perceives, sword down in front of him, is not even fighting to save him despite having said, and the man keeping him hostage… is his death incarnate. Charles might not even have gods left to pray to.

“What happens to the civil war here if he’s a goner?” the Master goes on. But his voice has lost that hint of confidence now, entirely. He’s only keeping himself talking. If he doesn’t, without his pretense, it all comes crumbling down and he’ll just be another child in this forest, with her. “More kings, coming through to earn their titles? More chaos? More factions? Will the Burgundians win over Paris without him giving orders? Will little Henry, the other contender to the throne?”

“Find out, why don’t you?” she replies coldly.

They hold each other’s gazes as tightly as the Master’s holding Charles in place. Moments go by in the night. Each one is a grain of sand in the beach of security she stands in right now. Each second only proves her more right. She might as well walk, unarmed, and remove the knife herself from Charles’s neck, but she wants to watch the Master unmask himself on his own.

“Please…” the dauphin mumbles incoherently from time to time. “Please, don’t…”

To watch a king beg, many would pay to see it. She just regards him with pity, in the final second of her duel with her old friend, and then sighs, before looking up into the Master’s dark eyes and finding the opposite of what she expected.

He lets go of the knife, puts it back into his belt, but nothing in him speaks the harsh language of defeat that burns hot as coals in an oven.

“Nah,” he says, as Charles dashes out of there without even looking back, “killing him would be too easy, too boring.” The Master’s sudden intake of breath turns into cold spirals in the night. “I’d rather see how this all unravels. Will his guts spill on the floor during the fighting that’s coming for him?” Then, he laughs. “Will anything happen the way it’s supposed to, now that it’s all happening earlier? Now that Paris is empty?”

And with those words, before she can rush to pick up her sword again and trap him, ask her questions and force him to answer them in violence, he vanishes again, and she’s left alone in the forest.

Perhaps the silence he leaves behind, in itself, is an answer.

The Master never abandons a place before wrecking its quietude further than imagination ever could. If it can never be quiet inside his head, why would the world outside it be?

* * *

Someone’s breathing out into her ear. They have been, for quite some time. In, out. In, out. The litany of those who get to sleep, even in such conditions under the crooked poles and fabric ceiling of a tent that won’t hold under wind any stronger than the night breeze.

The Doctor doesn’t know the soldier’s name. She knows that in their sleep, they always end up trapping her between them and the next person until she can’t breathe herself, or sleep, or think. She can’t even look at the stars. All that terrible fabric, with holes in it, wrinkly and dirty, keeps them from her.

Everything’s just so much louder in the night. The crickets, well camouflaged in the plants all around them, sing to themselves, shouting shrilly to every corner of the forest. But theirs is a chant, a cry for help, that goes unnoticed. If she wormed her way out right now, away from two soldiers that stink just like she does, and screamed out into the middle of nowhere, soon she’d have an army to explain herself to.

_No, sir,_ she’d have to say, on her knees. Unrecognizable even to the people she’s fought with and for. _I’m one of you. I stand with France._

One of the soldier’s arms moves in their sleep and plumps down onto her. She doesn’t recoil away from it. Back when she was still lying awake under no fake tent, counting days and formulating plans, she would have shoved hard until she had her personal space back. Now, however, she has not only lost count but the ability to _feel_ like personal space is a gain.

She hogs her own blanket for a warmth that is lost with every summer, thankful, even, that the two soldiers on both her sides act as a barrier for the cold to meet on its way to get to her. The arm remains on top of her, more dead weight than anything else. She slowly moves the mat she’s resting on so that she can face the forbidden skies.

Out there, somewhere, a younger her travels, much less lonely. And, going back years and years, an infinitely young her remains awake on a night much like this, with the desert howling through the walls of a barn. That primal terror of the unknown, the monsters in the dark that awaited her walking out on the morrow, kept her meek and quiet, the opposite of who she had been. She remembers the weight which helped her stop being so afraid of the fear that had her shut her eyes so firmly they hurt. Not an arm, not at first. Just a hand. And a name.

The Doctor doesn’t mean to blink away tears, but she has to. She sheds them, pretending she isn’t, and shoves the soldier’s arm away from her chest, causing them to breathe a little less deeply for a while.

_It’s okay…_ he had whispered to her, sitting on her bed as if it were no big deal, when the entire new recruitment team had been explicitly told not to move from their own beds that night. _They scare me, too._

_But I’m not scared,_ she’d said. _I’m just tired._

How can that myth have survived so long? How can it still turn her into a sleepless being?

_Well, I am._

_Stay with me, then. I’ll protect you._

He had protected her instead. Without further questions, he had just invited himself into her bed, laid his head next to hers on the pillow, tucked his hand into hers and squeezed it with a smile that had said exactly what none of them dared to put into words. That he knew she was the one fighting monsters that night, not him. That he’d keep her safe.

How can she be missing that right now?

Everything that they were died, like them. Over the times and with time. She was okay with that. It only hurt at first, when he began spreading the opposite of _safe_ and _protection_ behind her back to keep the lies going, and eventually in her face so she’d know he’d done it all for her. From then on… they ran in opposite directions. That’s the way it had to be. If they’d ever truly met in the middle, she doesn’t know what she would have done.

And this is the way it has to be now. The true middle, after all.

In this crazy endeavor of his to disrupt the natural course of history, allying himself with the Burgundian forces, she is but his match, once more, on the opposite side of the conflict. She couldn’t just fly away, come back at another time. There is too much at stake, too many important feats to keep track of, and _him_ to monitor.

At first, angry that he’d slipped out of her reach and didn’t seem inclined to show himself to her again, she had barely taken notice of it. But with the battles by the gates, inside the city, the Doctor got close enough to _understand._ His bluffs have not stopped once. He is still not being himself. Again and again and again, she has caught him yanking people out of their possible final moments, lodging his sword between soldiers on her side to keep the Burgundians from murdering them. Once, she saw him miss a hit directed at a man who will one day have an important role to play in the last days of the siege. The Master’s carefully arranging the strands of a history he shouldn’t know, in an order merely he comprehends.

The Doctor only ever left the battlefield, the camp, on one occasion. She made the long walk into the depths of the French countryside in search for her TARDIS. Plants had coiled themselves around the blue box. She groaned impatiently, beeped angrily, and hummed, very pleased, when the Doctor opened her doors.

At least inside her many walls the Doctor could look at the whole of every version of history and attempt to get a sense of it all. The Master was not being good in his refusal to kill, because by fighting—just like her—he was aiding in the murder of hundreds. He was not restoring the original chain of events either, and if he intended to by not having important pieces die, then why mess around with the rest of it?

She’d let herself slide all the way to the floor and had hidden her head between her knees. It was the same as ever. That void pulsing like a third heart. That fog in her brain, getting larger with each question, the jumble of disconcerting answers taking over. Time, swirling around her, whispering at her that she no longer had _time_ to come up with theories.

“Something doesn’t make sense,” she said to the emptiness. “ _I_ don’t make sense.”

The TARDIS replied quietly, the lights turning themselves on and off quietly, blue and yellow. The colors she likes.

“I’ll be fine,” the Doctor said, looking up at them in quiet appreciation. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

Of the wars, of the history. Of the sense of duty that burns hotter in her than flame.

And scared, so scared. Of tomorrow. The tomorrow she has never been able and will never be able to stop, no matter how fast she runs—either from or to it.

* * *

Nothing lasts forever, especially not skirmishes. Rising again with the sun, the armies wrestle over an empty city. But, one day, the sun rises colder than usual, clouds refusing to let any of its light through, and the conflict is terminated the only way it can. Someone just… wins a little bit more than the day before. The Burgundians breach another building, set up camp there as their army expands northward into the country, and Charles, receiving news of population support elsewhere, quite simply gives up part of his effort so he can move on as well in his reconquest of the country’s favors. Some, he leaves behind in Paris to control whatever new organization the Burgundians might create out of ashes, some he takes with him. Joan leaves, the Doctor stays to witness the flux of people slowly return to populate the once-evacuated Paris, almost a year ago.

One year she has been here, living history, reconstructing it. She won’t see Paris repurposed by the French, if she is lucky. That is still in the far-off future. Waiting here that long for the Master to make an appearance, afraid he will act behind her back if she dares travel in time… could mean waiting decades until the end of the conflict itself. And she has looked for him before, for the answers that he should carry with him, to no avail. He disappeared as soon as Paris began to recuperate.

She’s well-established herself within the city walls for now. She barely sleeps, walks the day and the night like a ghost, and keeps an eye on what she can, wandering around the blurriness of a life that moves too slow.

Mornings like today’s, she likes to amble without heading anywhere, without having a clear motivation or a time to return to her lodgings in a corner of a street in the middle of nowhere. Children have repurposed broken spaces in construction to play, when they’re not being called home to work; markets occupy their rightful spots, flies buzzing around produce and producers alike, and life has returned as if nothing had ever sapped it away. The cathedral’s bells toll, its towers rising higher than the sky itself, stone against air and cloud. People come and go, running to get to their destinations faster without much care for the person next to them.

The Doctor admires such a spirit for not dying with the city’s slow but sure ascent into a future metropolis.

A little girl bumps into her in the same manner, barely looking up to apologize in quick French before she vanishes in the small crowd. It is a miracle of sorts, or a testament to human nature, that being ruled by one or other faction hardly affects the subjects of such an occupation, especially now. She remembers the disguised words of the Master to her in the war camp. While kings battle for kingdom after kingdom, the people can only be content with not getting burned away in the process. What difference does it make, during these times, for them to be ruled by this fake king or that true king? They’re still rulers imposing their rules.

With the Master gone, maybe the Doctor should just… let France fall into its natural rhythm, its cycle of human wars. Maybe it’s time to skip this place and try again somewhere else; after all, she never did really figure him or his plan out. History returning to normal is what she was aiming for, in the end, in case she couldn’t get a hold of him. More involvement might, in the long run, mean the opposite of that. A tidal wave that floods shores instead of just licking at them with the curiosity of a mermaid meeting two-legged species for the first time. Time Lords were never even supposed to do more than just spot the shore from afar.

Somewhere in her head, emerging from the endless void, a whisper: _You’re a tidal wave._

The hooves of a horse coming in from one of the south gates fill the entire street as the messenger riding it yells:

“The Maid has been taken prisoner at Margny!” he announces. “The Maid has been taken prisoner at Margny!”

People all around immediately just _cease._ Their paths are discontinued, their activities entirely abandoned. They gather by the messenger as if he carried more news than just that.

They all ask their own questions. Where? How? By who? How long ago? Some even dare, despite this being a public place, to intone a heartfelt curse at the Burgundians.

The Doctor silently sends a thought out for Joan, and the future that now has finally held on tight to her. With the street pooling on one side of it, cutting the messenger off, it’s easier for her to move faster through it, to disappear without anyone noticing.

Yet, halfway past her usual path, she stops herself. Where is she going? In a few days, if it hasn’t happened already, Joan of Arc will know imprisonment, the last thing she will know, either in one place or another, before everything is stripped from her short life. It’s history, just because it’s happening as the Doctor stands next door that doesn’t make it less so. Her job here has been done. Nothing anyone can do—not even a runaway from another time like her—could change that fate now that it’s entirely up to the Burgundians in the north. The French _tried…_ and failed.

She knows—and feels for, she really does—what awaits Joan. Soon, the rest of the world will, too. If she closes her eyes, she can remember the names of the towns. The trail that leads to the stake. The smoke thrice dead.

A life that becomes a story, an inspiration. It was first a life, but now it must burn to be something else for other people to light candles in honor of.

The Doctor sends Joan of Arc a last thought, a prayer of sorts, to the god the French woman believes in, and moves on. She’s going home, where fire can’t touch her.

The walk back into the forest, carrying the longsword on her back, whatever few items she acquired in her time in Paris in her arms, takes a little more than a day.

A year and this is only the second time she’s come back… Yet when green gives way to blue, the blue of dreams and hope, emptiness parts in her hearts to let light in as if this was indeed the first. The small windows on her beautiful blue box let yellow beams of soft light out to greet her before she’s even standing before its locked doors. Keys, sonic screwdriver, she long ago lost track of those. The latter might be on the console, the keys… who knows? Deep into her bag of fleeting possessions. She doesn’t need them. Home is where the doors know, instinctively, that it’s her, that it’s been so long and not long at all, that she needs her old friend back.

Before, the TARDIS would never let her in without two-factor authentication and a bit of quiet arguing, voice against hum, toll, and engine roar. The Doctor cannot complain if lately she’s prone to these displays of silent affection. She lets the TARDIS ply her with brightness and the relief of a console room already ready for her as she enters.

Then, a questioning little noise all around her.

“Yes, I should leave now. The course that should be followed will be. It doesn’t look like anyone can really step in and change that, not now poor Joan’s where she is…” She sighs. “Why involve myself more, eh?”

Sometimes, at times like this, she wishes—a little—that the TARDIS had a voice to reply with words, instead of interpretable sound. She has been filling those sounds with the sentences she thinks to hear for too long… but sometimes, just sometimes, she wishes she could be proved wrong in her assumptions, and a voice older than time itself would soothe her with wisdom lost to every race in the universe.

The Doctor takes off her back scabbard, drops it next to the console together with her bag of stuff. She gets rid of her jacket as well. It has been ruined by time and wear.

“Where to now…” she repeats the question she seems to have found in the TARDIS’s ambiance sounds. “You tell me…”

Gently, she finds the command that will show her other places, other times, where the trail of the Master is still present.

The first that pops up almost does so cheekily. The TARDIS awaits in a silence very improper of them both.

“Until the very end, is that so?” the Doctor whispers.

The reason why he is choosing this for her once more and not the extermination of his usual ways keeps hammering against her conscience. Finding an answer for it is not primordial, and despite her initial inclination to pursue it regardless, she can’t say it ever was, although she does still have to meet the fracture in time and space he has created in honor of a preserved past and a safeguarded future. And this time it won’t be half as nice. She knows enough now to realize it’s a call to her, rather than a proper disturbance in history. That is twice that the Master has opted for preserving Joan of Arc’s life when it was otherwise endangered, either by circumstance or because of his own doings. Twice he’s made that his call to the Doctor.

She’s not very sure what drives her now to get to him after everything, whether that’s duty to the Council, her own temper having her ache to end him, or that curiosity born from inside the void. But, the way she sees it, she’s got little choice left other than to pull the TARDIS’s levers, turn the knobs, press the buttons, and let steam and time land her in late fall, 1430. A season too early for the real French resistance to be attempting to rescue the Maid of Orleans…

The wind blows into her eyes as soon as she opens the door and meets her new destination. Clouds pass by, driven by breezes of different speeds, ruled by different measures of time under the light of a sun that shines strong and placid on the world below it all. For an October morning, nothing in it, except maybe the cold that the winds arrive swirling with, could have ever convinced the Doctor that the weather fits into what fall should be.

A stone dwelling in the shape of a small tower lets the air strike against it, around it, as it stands unbothered in the heart of a clearing that opens a few tree rows away from where the Doctor has landed. By its structure, two figures move about calmly. One leans against the curved walls of the tower, the other… is sitting on a wooden chair outside; both taking in the gorgeous morning that has uncoiled before them.

Even from the distance, the Doctor recognizes them, hears their scarce words fill the very space nature has left vacant for them to, in between the rustle of leaves and grass, the whistle of air curling upwards.

“I know how to treat wounds like this…” says the figure by the stone wall. Joan. In barely more than a worn hosen and surcoat, she stands stiffly, perhaps uncomfortable in such a state of undress, unarmored and alone in front of him.

The Master. On the dark-wood chair, he turns, left arm stretched over the back of it, and nods at her.

“Nothing further from what I intended, undermining your skills. But it was the least I could do, given the circumstances. Heal you, clothe you with something more than those… undergarments.” He sighs, then adds, almost to himself: “It was wretched of them, to leave you in nothing but what you’d normally wear beneath the armor.”

That tone of his, that addenda… it slows the Doctor’s previously confident steps, hiding her in the last row of trees that separate her from them. Unseen by her, he is in an element all his to tread on as he wishes, perceptible as he truly is. It might show her the truth, unabridged. The real nature of his game and why Joan is here, beside him.

“Thank you,” Joan just says.

Her arms are crossed over her chest, so very slightly, hardly pressed against her, as if she had a wound she was wary of. The Doctor vaguely remembers an arrow, a horse… and a perfect window for the Master to have acted, as Joan was being carried away into her first prison, her plate armor peeled off her, her weapons discarded.

“Where are we?” Joan asks him after a while.

“Oh, not too far off from Compiègne.”

Joan glances around at the forest that also stretches behind her, in a circle at which center she and the Master stands. Her eyes pause on the breadths of grass as much as they do on the tiny clusters of clouds, fading away already. She sniffs in roughly once to pass some mucus down, then says:

“It’s colder here. Much colder.”

“That’s because it’s October, Joan,” the Master replies, his voice gentle and understanding. “Not May, as you may believe.”

The Doctor’s hearts begin to beat slower in her chest. Slow and pounding at once, as if the final shoe had been dropped, the beat in a concert had come at exactly the time no one was expecting it to. He shouldn’t be telling Joan that. It will only make matters worse, in the end. Whatever the end turns out to be.

Joan snorts softly, although she cannot help to raise her head up at the skies again, and watch the careful workings of nature, which do not lie like she feels he might be lying. He smiles at her, almost on the verge of a bout of giggles, because he, like the Doctor, has noticed what she’s doing.

“Really. It is.”

Joan frowns. “I wasn’t out that long.”

“No. And neither was the world, if you’re wondering.”

“Is this the work of God?” He shakes his head back in her direction in place of an answer. The wind scatters his dark hair. “Magic, then? Or the science of men?”

He does laugh now, with the calmness of someone who knows the answer and could explain, but will not. Her judgmental stare, rough and hard, does not yield. It has puzzled her, yet not confused her. She has taken it at face value, the passage of time.

“I know you,” she says, interrupting him. “I have seen you before. You did something then. As you have now.”

He holds her gaze, or so the Doctor thinks. His back is turned to her for a long time.

“Yes,” he simply says, then, after a while.

Joan’s arms remain crossed. “Am I your prisoner, sir?”

He sighs, his head leaning forward for a moment. Then, he draws breath, and his entire body shakes slightly with the motion.

“No…” he says, barely loud enough for the Doctor to hear. “No, dear, you’re free to go. Back to your people, back to Margny… Back to your cell, if you’d like. Your fate is yours.”

“Then why save me from the Burgundians, if you were just soon to give me the choice to walk back into their lands, regardless? And I will.”

“I don’t think it matters any longer. Where you are now, what matters is that you choose your own path. That you’re free to choose it. But you’ve always known that. I’m just echoing words back to you… I simply knew that a girl was wounded between four stone walls, and I don’t like the fate chosen—no… _imposed_ —on wounded girls in cells.”

Instead of saying anything to him, Joan’s eyes glance to her right, and they meet the Doctor, still barely out of the trees, barely stepping into the small clearing where the tower stands.

How could she move at all? He was just like her, once. A child bright and full of stories to tell, to share, to build out of air and hope. Power and time did the rest, transformed beauty into relentlessness that, in the end, nobody could put to use safely, not even those who intended to. The last she remembers of him as _warm,_ as _understanding_ , as anything _kind_ in any way, died with that child. They killed a part of her with it, too.

When something _warm_ tries to rouse inside her in response to his words to Joan, the Doctor lets it come forth, then, held between her hearts, in the cornerstone of her quietest self, she lets it die, cold, like a frozen flame in a blizzard, and finally shows herself from out of the tree line.

The Master wastes no time, upon spotting her, to mutter something to Joan, inaudible for the Doctor, so that the Maid of Orleans will go inside the small stone tower.

Standing in the wind, ever changing direction, he lets it mess about with his hair, lets it push dark locks into his eyes, and simply awaits her, his hands into his pockets.

“What have you come for this time? Her? Me?”

He actually breathes out in premeditated defeat.

“Both,” she volunteers to him, cocking her head to the side.

“See? I don’t know if I can believe that…” he says tenderly… shifting languages from the French that two TARDISes breathe into their minds to their own. “Not anymore.”

“What’s with the Gallifreyan?”

They have not talked in their own mother tongue in ages. Once their home was abandoned, so was everything else. Customs, dreams, the concept of home itself. Never to be regained ever again.

“She’s inside, but she’s no fool. Do you think I want to discuss someone’s death with them in the vicinity? Do you know what that does to a person?” He kicks the ground softly, almost laughing as he does. “I suppose not. You’re…” He gestures at her with an open palm. “Well, you. You’d accidentally let it slip and profusely apologize later, while not really caring, because you wouldn’t be there afterwards to deal with it. Then you’d forget.”

“She has to die in her allotted time and space.” She leans in to stare into his eyes. They both know what comes next. “And so do you.”

“Says who?”

She almost rolls her eyes. “You know who.”

“Back in the day, you didn’t follow those rules. Time and space weren’t constrictions, limitations. Why are they such a thing now? Why _now_ , Doctor? Don’t you wonder?” he asks, and… the worst part is, he seems to be asking honestly, not provocatively.

“Do I have a choice not to? But time after time, I try to put things right, and you’re in my way.” She shrugs nonchalantly. “I wonder what that is about. What you are doing, protecting an eighteen-year-old you couldn’t care less about.”

“I care more than you.” He shrugs back. “With me, she’ll live longer than her allotted year.”

“With you, she’ll live in a destroyed version of the world she’s supposed to leave _behind_.”

He blinks slowly at her.

“And?”

“And I think it’s time. You’ve given her a reprieve, nothing more. It can still end now, before you make it worse than you already have.”

She’s expecting him to chuckle, bright and abrasive as fire. Instead, his eyes and their depths dazzle her in the intricacy beneath them before his words even can.

“So I’m just supposed to… let you take her back to that?” he says, his tone the harshest flavor of soft. “Let time be cruel and burn away a life that now flames bright only feet away from you, behind that door?”

“ _Yes_.”

When she leans in again, he actually smiles.

“And if I refuse?” he says, leaning towards her as well. His eyes linger for a moment on the lack of a belt or scabbard on her. “You have no sword this time.”

The Doctor curves her lips into an empty grin.

“That’s because I don’t _need_ one.”

“You’ll really do it, won’t you?” He stares at her, then nods. “Do what’s right. Take her back, let history reclaim her. Bring me to your Council, let them claim me as the villain in their story.”

“It’s what you are.”

“No, Doctor. It’s what you _made_ of me. But you’ve looked again. And again and again. I know you’ve seen things that have kept you coming to me instead of to them.”

If only she could refute that. But for the few seconds that she spends racking her brains in search for a single counterargument, all that creeps out of the shadows is her indecision for a year and a half, and how it would have lasted on and on, if she had let it last.

“I’ll still do it,” the Doctor says.

“I don’t doubt it. But, unfortunately—” His eyes glimmer warmly this time, hovering on the entrance to her own but never quite reaching in, not now. “—that means you’ll have to live on… without your answers.”

She snorts, bending back a little with restrained hilarity.

“You don’t have them. You never have,” she asserts. “This is just your game.”

He shakes his head slowly. “Not this time.”

“Whose, then?”

A pause breaks a thought in two. A heartbeat returns it to the mind that should receive it. When she does, she’s not sure she wants to, even though it is, in the end, the one thing she has been after all this time.

“You know whose,” the Master finally says, his eyes not leaving hers as he speaks.

In the following silence, every half-thought sucked into her void is zapped out into her conscious mind, returned to the surface by his words, by the meaning she gave to him first earlier on in the conversation. _Them._ The only them that has ever existed in their long history.

The Master could be lying, the Master could have tricked her again into one of his impossibly knotty creations, the Master could still be playing. And yet… this clarity that buzzes within her, this sudden recognition of patterns in the past year and a half… Something in the fabric of it all, she can feel it. He wove a net of truth in the lie she perceived at the time. But it wasn’t him _lying_ at the core of it. It’s not rebellion he’s after, or he’d be on a Dalek ship, commanding his natural enemies on his own, teaching them the most well-preserved secrets that could destroy Gallifrey’s inner defenses well and forever. He would be snaking his way into the Time Lord’s continuum in the smallest, pettiest ways, as he always has, while he let the Daleks in. But he isn’t, he’s in 15th-century France with Joan of Arc.

“Take her back, then…” the Master says, quietly. He’s not looking at her anymore, his eyes lost in the forest where her TARDIS hides, where his probably does as well. “Let her meet the fate that was chosen for her. Take me back, too. I’ll meet mine, face it squarely.” With a turn of his face, the ever-changing ashes of their childhood together rise in between them when he looks into her eyes again. “But I want you to know… the Doctor I knew would never do it this impassively.”

That dries the Doctor’s mouth and throat like a lifetime on Gallifrey’s deserts and many lifetimes afterwards in the aridity, the loneliness of the universe. The Master is never supposed to give in. Never. Not even in jest.

“What?” she asks quietly; almost in a hiss. She tries to channel the anger that begs to be released from inside her elsewhere before she crashes and burns: “You think I’m… _impassive_ about this?”

“The Doctor I knew,” he repeats, “would have stood here and suffered the consequences of the choice, not sent a girl to be slaughtered like she did this every day. Especially after almost _two years._ That’s what I’m saying.”

“It’s history,” she says, almost mutters. Impassively. She supposes, when she realizes, that proves him right. It’s what needs to be done. But she does suffer, she just can’t show it. She never once could. If she let her feelings grow inside her, if she let them overpower her, she would never have become the Doctor. “I didn’t choose it.”

“You are. Now. So choose well.”

Those words… They echo, they swirl, they stir. Her mind, the void, the questions. One whole, incomplete. Sucking in, sucking out.

He laughs when he realizes she is stuck in the whirlpool of the choice. And, ironically, he is right in that, too: she can’t choose.

“Well, isn’t that something?” he says, backing away from her. He even allows himself a tiny chuckle before he reaches his chair and, once again, sits in it, as if she wasn’t even there. “Never mind, Doctor. I’ll do it myself. After all, it was me who lifted her out of that filthy cage she’d been put in. I think I should be the one, don’t you? The one to put her back so she can rot in it for a while, and then another one, and another one, until her time is up. And… don’t fret. I will do it in the most compassionate way that I know, so she will never remember she had a chance, so she will not suffer more than all she is to, historically.”

Since when does he care about compassion? How is he able to stand there, close enough that the air each breathes out stirs with their words, and speak of restoring the fractures in history himself? What has she been missing in his hearts that ultimately it is that easy for him to give up and accept a death he could have stopped but not has to cause on purpose? Could it be that what he’s saying is true, that what he’s hinting at and never quite letting her in on is what has always been coming…?

Too many questions… The air stirs in her chest, all around her. Freezing, imperturbable.

“You can meet me there, if you like. To clap me in irons, just at the same time as Joan of Arc will be. Poetic much.” Suddenly, he stands on his feet and faces her for the last time, one hand already reaching for the doorknob. “Or… you can keep chasing me across the universe until you’ve decided what you want to do with me. Since I’m a little more complicated to history than a girl on fire. Your choice. Always your choice. Always your thread we all hang by, isn’t it?”

He opens the door at last. It creaks under his touch yet doesn’t open completely. He puts his other hand on the stone wall, then looks at her, full of the same intensity, the same sadness that already made her reality lose shine and edge back in Paris, up on the ramparts of its walls and gate. That sadness… The face that carries it as well as he never did anything else, any other emotion, ever before in the lives of him that she’s known.

“You know…” he says, turning to her only a little, one foot already up on the stone steps to the house inside, head hanging low. “They have burned you away, Doctor, like history will her.”

The Doctor is still there when the door is shut behind him. She knows she will be there a long time. She knows 1431 will come and go, she knows Joan of Arc will burn, and she knows she won’t travel there to see it. She can’t. And she won’t, because of so much more than just defending her well-camouflaged compassion to him. If that means letting him go the one time he said he would let her catch him without fanfare or war getting in the way, then yes, she is letting him go. But she cannot deny that whatever he has done, whatever he has told her, the void that plagues her is a little clearer, the blurriness less so after his advent. His presence and clues have germinated in a robust enough ivy that has managed to coil around her ankles and make her stop. Stop and think in the impossibility of motion. What is really going on? Who is really fighting who? Who wins? Who loses? Why now? Why like this? Why when she’s got this hole in her head? Who put it there? Why? If she turns him in now, lets things develop as she was explicitly told they should, it’s all black and white again. It’s all the color of the sky, all menacingly white in the mornings before the suns rise and turn it into color. Meanwhile, nobody actually stops to question the weight and importance of grey rain clouds. And the ones watching on top of the dome simply have to insist that all there ever was is the white they see.

_They have burned you away_ , the Master has said. He called to the _they_ that made them both, not just him _. They… have burned… you away._ He said he had her answers and, however vague, those words are the last layer to uncover before reaching one. All of this has not been his game, not _just_ his game. For the first time in a long time, she thinks he might really just be a piece in it. And she has always known—because she ran from them a long time ago and has now just come in their rescue to follow their orders as blindly as she can—the faces that _they_ wear. The names they chose.

* * *

The Council sit at their table, entirely devoid of any light around them but that which filters through a sole rectangular window that covers the entire wall. Thin in its width, the white skies of Gallifrey pierce the Doctor’s eyes as she enters the chamber. She has to blink the sudden pain away until her mind interprets something more than just light. Out there, before dawn breaks and two suns rise behind the distant rocky horizon, slightly warped by the transparent dome of the Citadel, a few clouds in soft orange tones await the first bath of color, hiding beyond the curvature of the beige bubble, the flat surface of reflective metal Dalek saucers that will never be able to ever fly away from their atmosphere.

“Any luck this time, Doctor?” a Council member asks, looking up at her on entrance. “Although, seeing as you have returned empty-handed once more, I fret to ask.”

She stands, facing the terribly white light. their eyes inquire without any need for words, but their stares are empty, disinterested. They might as well be asking her to discuss the price of local fabric.

“Some better luck. I’ve been able to secure a location. Thoroughly,” she says, throwing her hair back in order to let them see her whole face. The way to score a lie is to sell is as the only possible truth. Every word she says _is_ true, just not the truth. And she tightly presses her fingers together as she speaks them. As she silently declares herself a traitor. All for what, a hunch? “But for the present moment, the Master still remains harder to catch that I may have initially believed.”

A few chuckles fill the room for a few moments. She clears her throat to disperse them. She didn’t come here to be misjudged for the mediocrity they saw fit to hire her to fill in for.

“Will you be needing any… backup?” another member of the Council says.

“No,” she says firmly. “Not unless you’re in any hurry.”

Another bout of chuckles confirms that nothing could be further from reality. The Council could sit for a million years, awaiting news, and upon her return, they’d still have the same reaction even if the entirety of the planet was dead, as long as they remained. Once, she called that wisdom, impartiality. Two years ago, she thought she could follow that method herself in order to _end_ what they, on their comfortable chairs in their pleasant darkness, would wait eternities to solve. Now, she just makes tighter fists in her old, worn tux that smells like another war.

“That’ll be all, then, Doctor. We look forward to hearing about your final success, after this timeless maneuvering.”

“So do I. It won’t take much longer. Where the Master stands now, it is not easy to escape.”

“Good enough, then.”

She exits the chamber without another word. Her footsteps outside it come accompanied by some muttering, some distant voices aside from her own. The Council breathes quietly, waiting it out until their chamber rests in utter silence again.

“Does she suspect anything, do you think?” the President asks.

“About the decisions of this Council? Nothing at all, sir. But she might, soon, with how insistent he is being. The recordings show her… wavering in his presence, at times. And she has willingly refused to apprehend him on several occasions now, despite reporting otherwise.”

“Not to mention, she’s protecting his new identity,” another Council member grumbles. “Refusing to gender him…”

“The second the Master shares the pertinent information about the bubble with her, she will be eliminated,” the President states after some time, “long before we can give her the chance to return here with him. She has been disloyal to this institution often enough in the past.”

“In her _youth_ ,” someone points out. “Well before we played with her memories.”

“A young Time Lord is the most dangerous Time Lord. And the Doctor has never lost her youth, not completely. She _remembers_ what it was like. To be forced. To be lectured. To be bribed. To be _broken._ Even after the Matrix, the Doctor still remembers. If, in that allyship they seem to have struck before we erased her, she told the Master how she placed the bubble in our skies, I hope for all our sakes that he gets through to her soon… Or our plans might just have to wait until we’re done warring, not only against those Daleks, but those two as well…” The President sighs as he looks out his window. “And the stars only know, any sane Gallifreyan should fear the wrath of the Doctor and the Master combined.”

“Patience will reward us in time, Lord President. Even if that civil war should come to happen, you shall be crowned victor of it.”

“Oh, I know…” the President says unaffectedly. “And I will torture the information we need out of them once that is done. But I would rather they give it to me out of their own free will. It will save us time. It will save them suffering at first. And it will be a reward of an entirely different kind, to let them see us ascend while they rot in our fire, helpless, powerless. Children, again. Just… tiny, broken children of time.”

* * *

“Staying true to our promises, are we?” Gat says. She’s sitting cross-legged by one of the desks in the workshop designated to her and her team, now empty. It’s too early for anyone to still be around. After all, people do still have lives, elsewhere. Lives that are important to tend to in times of war.

The Doctor takes off her jacket, hanging it off her shoulder.

“I never promised anything to you,” she says.

Gat glances up at her with half a smirk on her face. If she makes note of the extreme wear on the Doctor’s clothes, she does not show it.

“No, I guess not.”

The Doctor sits in the vacant chair, on the desk right by Gat’s. Blueprints for failed projects take up all the space on both, models for prototypes standing as bookends on top of the printed ones. The Doctor is impressed to see how few of those pertain to the Council’s machinery to travel through the bubble into the Vortex. Instead, Dalek parts are drawn in careful brush, time and time again, picked apart by capable minds, yet never fully understood enough to replicate, to invade, to destroy from within.

“And yet… you’re here,” Gat says. “I didn’t really have high hopes that you’d turn up to help, you know?”

The Doctor doesn’t reply at first. She picks up a blueprint, old, often used. The procedures behind the theory have not been cracked quite yet. The engineers here, they grasp the basics of a Dalek, biologically and mechanically, but they’ve never leveled with them in combat. Time Lords have always battled them from afar, with powerful defenses, distance, and battleships to hide behind. Their teams lack experience.

“Where I’ve been,” she says, almost mutters, “has turned out to give me pretty much all the confirmation I’d been seeking that neutrality in war only gets innocents dead because of the main rulers’ negligence.”

“I wouldn’t have come to you earlier if I hadn’t known that you already believed that beforehand. After all, I’m risking more than you, I’m no Doctor,” Gat says, but she’s smiling. “If they’re spying on you, and they happen to hear this, they will always keep you alive longer than me.”

“If they’re spying on me, I doubt they’re paying attention to a side job I’m doing for their engineers, Gat.” Today, it’s just a side job, but if the Doctor’s read the other Time Lord right, and she’s pretty sure she has, this is about something more than just speeding up the process on the Dalek battlefront. “What reason could they have? It’s slow, it’s torturous, what I’m doing out there, chasing an idiot until the idiocy gives out. Why would they want to watch that?”

They both breathe out in the empty workshop.

“So, what’d you reckon? About the Daleks?” Gat asks.

“You’ve studied them well.”

Gat nods.

“But not well enough.” Gat almost laughs at the Doctor’s honesty. “We need to get ourselves a few Dalek carcasses in good condition. There should be a few outside the city.”

“Nobody told me you’d be this picky!” Gat jokes.

But the Doctor’s not listening to her. She gets up from the chair, picks up a pencil from one of the desks, and fiddles with it between her fingers as she begins to think out loud.

“Then we’ll need to somehow hack into one of the systems that connects every member of the Dalek species together, preferably one that disables a few core functions or removes the conscience from using the machine. Should be easy enough, except that the second I find out how to destroy that bubble, it won’t just be a few saucers flying around, will it? We’ll also need to amplify the reach of whatever we end up designing…”

“We can get rid of these few Daleks first,” Gat says. “There’s nothing my team and I do better than experiment on plans ourselves. And big systems are always a beautiful thing to solve…”

There’s a glimmer in Gat’s eyes as she says that that severs the Doctor’s current thought line in two. She shakes her head to regain control over which of those she wants to follow.

“I’ll go find you some parts myself,” the Doctor says. She grabs her jacket again to put it on so quickly she almost gets the sleeves wrong. “Before anyone’s back to work.”

As she stands in the middle of the workshop, where her TARDIS did, too, not that far back, Gat stares at her, her eyes almost cold.

“Make sure they’re good and dead, Doctor,” she says. “Wouldn’t want to lose you to the enemy before all this even starts.”

“It started too long ago, believe me…” the Doctor says. “And they really couldn’t be deader.”


	3. You ignited with the world

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content Warning:** Paragraph-long reference to a plague and its management.

_He can’t not enjoy the early evenings, after toiling all day under the deadly sun. Merasta welcomes him home, much too excited to remove the straw hat from his head and ruffle his hair. In another world, in another time, that hat, his overlong light brown clothes would have earned him an artistic nickname. Here, he is just a stranger with burned cheekbones instead of the protective layer of bark-like skin of the locals._

_Over the years, they’ve developed a tradition to sit together for a while, mostly under the stars, in order to allow the day to fully transition out of their systems. Merasta’s never had the slightest problem whenever he’d go on and on about those stars. From the beginning, he thinks it was something in his favor. Merasta would wait in silence until the last word of every story was uttered, no matter how long it took him to finish. Once, both sun and night rose into and fell from the sky the day he finally told them the truth about his ship stranded on the cliffs with another ship growing entire dimensions inside it—and all they did was ask questions._ Why did you do such terrible things? _they said._ Who did you do them for?

_And what a hard question to answer, who, regardless of what follows it._

_Now, however, when he and Merasta let the dome of the stars keep them company in the dark, it’s not a new story Merasta’s seeking._

_He’s put his arms around them, this person who on paper should be so different from everything he has ever been, from day one to here. No one from their species has the ability to be who he was and, sometimes, he fears they can never truly understand, he fears maybe that’s why he chose Merasta. To be with, to tell it all to. Still, he holds them, and he sighs._

_They glance up at him from his shoulder, where they’re resting their head._

_“Long day?” they say._

_“Very long day,” he says. “You?”_

_“Long day,” Merasta agrees with a nod, but they chuckle to themself anyway._

_“What?”_

_“Nothing. I just remembered something.”_

_“Is it how gorgeous I look in that ridiculous hat?”_

_“In a way.”_

_“Smart me…” he congratulates himself for having guessed it._

_“It’s very stupid of you to go burn yourself in the sun day after day. We can do that job. We’re born for it. Thick skin, genetic predisposition… I don’t have to go on.” They pause. “You could be staying indoors in a library.”_

_He laughs softly. He can tell they’re not sure what of, what at, what with. To be honest with himself, the memory is distant enough in his own mind that that it shouldn’t even echo as hard inside it anymore._

_They slap him softly in the upper arm, which incidentally only makes his laughter pick up in intensity._

_“You know I’m making sense,” Merasta says. “So… why don’t you? Your skin will eventually fall off if you keep scorching it like this, doesn’t matter how many layers of cloth you wear.” They smile through their very breath. “Or how big your hat is.”_

_“Don’t worry about me, Mer. I had my skin fall off once forever ago and here I am, all fine in a town living with you.”_

_They rise up from his shoulder to stare into his eyes. It keeps rendering him idiotically silent when they do that, and thus reminds him of their worry for him. Very few people have ever grown to worry, to care for a creature like him. Even now, before they speak, he thinks to himself he’s not sure if he’d rather not hear them say what they undoubtedly will._

_“I’m serious, Yann. Why don’t you just quit, find something less… abrasive?”_

_He sighs, gaze straying down from stars and Merasta’s own eyes to the ground. Among the soil, dirt, and small pebbles their house stands on, thin particles of sand still flow in all the way from the beach, a few streets away. He drags his feet across them._

_“I chose this. I go to the fields, day after day, and… it continues to be a wake-up call.” He doesn’t have to explain what of to them. “Besides, it scratches me up a little, so what?, it can’t kill me. And even if it could, I wouldn’t want to give it up.”_

_Merasta breathes out slowly. They, too, look out at the small parcel of land the separates their house from the rest of the street. Without any light to illuminate the night, it makes any space, however small, feel infinitely more private._

_“You and your Chalise complex…” they say._

_“Who?”_

_Merasta chuckles as if he’d told a bad joke they still found funny._

_“Chalise. The myth of Chalise and the sun god?”_

_“Never heard of it. I think sometimes you forget I’m literally an alien. From outer space. Who has lived for very long. And, say I’d heard of it, chances are I might have forgotten anyway.”_

_They slap him softly again, their frown furrowed._

_“Come on, now you have to tell me,” he says. “Or I’ll have to announce myself on the market tomorrow as the idiot who doesn’t know this apparently very popular myth, and you’ll be scorned for being the idiot in love with the former idiot.”_

_And he couldn’t have explained why, to them or himself, but before they so much as take a breath to begin, deep in his hearts he has to bury the sentiment that hounds him. A feeling, as well, that insists it’s a story old as time itself and, thus, a story he must know, one way or another. A story he must have lived, himself. Time ago. Or, even more scarily, is_ still _living_.

“ _Chalise was ordinary, in most ways that a person can be, except that she happened to be in love with the sun god.”_

_What a lovely premise, and how strangely familiar to him._

_“But the problem with gods is that they possess too much power, oftentimes in ignorance of what it means to wield it, oftentimes in the knowledge and hubris that no one else can ever match it. The sun god strolled around the planet ruthlessly, burning and blazing crops and lives, since they had harnessed the starlight to fancy themself a corporeal form. People all over the towns and islands gathered until they realized the god’s intent was to walk their lands in search for one of them. Chalise had been allowed to reunite with the sun god in physical form at the cost of an entire planet, but because the sun god ached for that reunion as well, seeking the same love she professed, she also had the ability to lull and love the god away.”_

_Of course, he in his hearts knows how terribly such a thing would end. Divinity and mortality hardly ever make a good match. The universe created too much in shadow to cast it into light without consequences._

_“In their arms, Chalise sang songs of the sea by the beach that leads to the islands of Greanniol until the sun god exhausted the energy that kept them tangible, physical, and real in the way Chalise’s people feared. Momentarily weakened, the sun god had no other choice but to take to the skies in the only form it knew outside a tangible body: beams of sunlight that could not voice the unsaid promise that they would return, one day, scorching fire on a planet without burning it to death, to hold Chalise again one more time.”_

_Love in itself is a promise. Making another to keep its flames alive reminds him of old times, old threats, and old loves he tried and failed to let go of. He knows now why this story needed to find him._

_“Because she loved them, Chalise waited in faith that the sun god would find enough energy to rebuild corporeity, and the necessary humanity to understand why it needed to be grounded in much more than just power. She kept returning to the beach. In thick curtains of hailstorms, in disconcerting heat, against ocean waves taller than herself, against the wishes of a heart that now was broken for life, by life. Chalise waited all her life on that beach, by choice and faith, until her years were spent, because she knew that no matter what, there would still be a sun up in the sky, shining after it all. And, in a way, the sunlight was the wordless love of her sun god, the wordless promise, and the wordless message asking her to please just wait a bit longer.”_

_Merasta closes their eyes, remains quiet for a single breath, then concludes a tale that to their people is a mere depiction of the history of their abrasive sun._

_“Chalise loved the sun and always knew it would come back to her. The sun always did.”_

_A long time goes on before he knows how to react to that wording, to what it really means for him._

_“And that’s the story…” Merasta breathes out. “I don’t know if that helps you make sense of what I said before, about you choosing the hardship and sacrifice of a life where you could just… move on.”_

_Merasta couldn’t be more right. They just have no idea. He’s chosen much more than to suffer._

_He lets his air out slowly through his nose._

_“It’s a beautifully sorrowful story, isn’t it?” he says. His eyes have found the sky again. “Where I come from… we don’t look at the stars and dream of them, make up stories to explain why they’re the way they are.” Then, he realizes his mistake, and laughs to himself, lopsidedly. “Except, well, for one, I suppose.”_

_The brightest, most notorious. The star that burned down the planet because there was no Chalise to stop it that day. There had been one, on the opposite side of everything, providing the flammable material for ethical arson where nobody could see. And he’d still grown to be Chalise, into his new lives. A Chalise that waits for the fire to be put out, a Chalise that waits, quite simply. For the star to come back down in a shape he can trap or touch and for it to land in fire so he can decide whether he’ll blow it bigger or blow it out._

_Even in Merasta’s arms now, in the cool dark of a night that shows him the distant corners of the universe he was forced to abandon, he asks himself the question that landed him here. Why?_

_What is he doing, stranded in a planet where the very sunlight kills, waiting for his own sun god to become visible, tangible again? What has he been doing all his life, waiting for the intermittent return of something as long gone, as terribly lost as Chalise’s sun god?_

_Why would he wait, all these years, through an enmity that marked generations and a love that has taught him what it feels like to be the mark someone else is leaving behind?_

_Why are you still waiting?_ The Master asks himself, halfway between the memory trapped within the dream and the reality that dries his throat quicker than the murderous sun on those cliffs ever did. _Why do you still insist on bitter hopes after a year and a half?_

It is to a room with scraped wallpaper that he awakens. He bought the yellow paper the day he decided he couldn’t continue sleeping in empty rooms. He gave up trying to put it up the day she was ready to bleed him dry and he was ready to let her. Every night since then, an artificial, torn yellow—in the pale shadow of the yellow room in the Doctor’s TARDIS—greets him whenever he opens his eyes from the tortures of the past and the future.

His groan is the only sound here now. And it can’t fill all the available space.

As he sits up from the couch he’s made his bed, he realizes it has been a long time since he last thought of Merasta and since he _remembered_ the past that Missy’s experience through it had blurred out considerably. Chalise’s myth hadn’t been on his mind, then. Chalise hadn’t _been_ anything but a room, then.

In a way, it’s all a room now, too.

What is he doing, still abandoned on the shores of a wild sea, hoping the night will end, hoping at the end of the longest, the most terrible day, the sun will still breach the horizon that is his life?

Because he knows he might be close, closer than he has been in almost two years, but the further he goes, the harder it is to continue. Giving up is the burden of guilt that he carries when he wakes, when he remembers, and he feels in the end the only choice he will have left will be to set it free.

He almost laughs nervously to himself as he recalls a very human saying. _If you love it, set it free._ As he recalls Merasta’s words to him.

Chalise let the sun god free. He might have to let the Doctor go, too, one day.

One day… When it gets bad enough.

His TARDIS hums now in the silence.

He takes a sharp breath in and sits on the mattress before he gets up to his feet.

“But not today,” he says.

Through the gray corridors outside his room, he drags heavy feet back to the console room. Every single breath that leaves him somehow weighs more than the interrupted sleep that pours out of his face until he tries to rub it away. None of it ever sates the holes left behind, empty and untended to. Some lights flicker at the first sign of him coming out of the corridor, and yet so distinctly blue and yellow—indelibly so—that even when dimmed he forces himself to look away from them.

One of the monitors on the console has been playing a random TV channel close to on mute since before he landed in France. He hardly pays attention to it as he fixes himself some coffee from the machine he plugged to the console; he doesn’t really plan to listen to the program, he honestly just needs the company. All around him, so blended into his mental image of the place, he long ago hung picture after picture on walls and hanging threads to create visual maps. Of the situation in France where he was getting himself into, the notes he concocted about morality, the burdens of evil, choices in war, lists of pros and cons to wrap every plan up before he committed to it. Of every memory and every record of the Doctor during the Time War, so he could play around it all. By now, most of the sheets of paper have been wrinkled, worn, or withered. He no longer needs them. He’s not sure he would use any of the information on them, even if he did.

With a warm cup of coffee in his hands, the Master sits on the chair, a mirror of the original, and drinks in silence for a while. It’s the only thing keeping him awake, lately, connecting him more to the human race than anything else he thought he knew about them. Something about the bags under his eyes, the jiggling of his legs to overcompensate for the silence he can’t fill on his own, eclipses the grief of that summer he and the Doctor spent in Bristol, hidden from life itself. Sleeplessness has shown him a dulling to that grief, and a loneliness too acute to just belong to the eternal Time Lords.

Sleeplessness and, well, _her._ He has lost her like she once lost Clara. To spirals, old and new, that he can no longer climb or cut into more manageable shapes and that she traverses just as easily as ever, even when pushed to the limit, to the edge, to the breaking point.

He waited. By the walls of a prison where a French hero would be trapped her whole life. He waited for black-and-white to come through the gray mist. Nights are a mere blink in time and space when you can have it all and have it more than once, but those twelve hours of darkness he spent alone in Compiegne, letting his hearts channel the murmured screams of the prisoners with every beat, were the longest he remembers living. When dawn broke, and the sun stripped him of his last hope, every ounce of confidence he’d built up in his own head was destroyed as easily as that sun’s radiation would anything in close proximity. He left Compiegne soon afterwards but has remained in France ever since, and every day that he still wakes up in the yellow room, the Master opens the communication channels, hoping to pick up the distinctive loud whir of the Doctor’s TARDIS.

If she had shown up that day, he likes to think he would have known what to do, what to say, what aspects of himself to alter minimally so she’d notice in hindsight, so she’d travel again and again back to him, so she’d finally ask him the questions it’s so obvious she’s desperately asking herself, seeking the answers everywhere else she can.

But her absence… He doesn’t even know what to interpret out of it, how to grapple with it anymore. All those clues perfectly placed in plain view for her to find, for her to chase him about. She never showed to any of those fixed days either. He’d just been so sure this time she would; his spoken word should have done enough to appeal to her sense of duty, so prevalent back in the days that she is now experiencing as her present.

“…a 20% of the so-called Neanderthal gene might have survived evolution, still existing today in the DNA of identified pockets of modern human populations in Europe and Asia…”

One sentence among many filters in through to his consciousness, pulling his attention from the coffee and his desolation to the screen. He watches for some time, processing the information in the anthropology documentary as an idea begins to form in the back of his mind. He could very well tie these new data together, so far removed from France and the 15th century, into a new chain of mismatched events that would lure the Doctor to him, if not out of the doubts corroding her, at least out of her sense of duty, ferrous and callousing them both with every passing second.

“…some argue that this particular residual prehistoric gene may substantially affect the risk of developing several diseases…”

Those words echo in the cavities of his very self, like drums of war, like two pounding hearts awaiting it. It has ceased to be a mere idea.

The Master quickly gets up, leaving his cup of coffee behind, and grabs a red marker out of a pencil holder. He long ago wasted his last blank sheets of paper, so one of the used ones will do. As the documentary goes on, muted now in his head, he notes down in quick and bent calligraphy the beginning stages of a new plan. An almost fully-fledged theory for the most perfect execution, once it can be brought to life.

Thick red lines stain black notes scribbled on yellowed paper years ago. In abbreviated French, he writes down the premise. In circular Gallifreyan, to save up space, he connects it quickly with his knowledge of chemistry and marks every element he will need to do this. To make it work fast, efficiently, and lethally. Only a true threat can carry its own connotations. The Doctor will never fall for less.

And, right now, confused, angered, tired, she might refuse him. She might let him expose his own bluff, as she did with Charles, and in her mess of emotions, out of spite, finally bring herself to take him home with her, to a fate that neither can afford but that he can’t fight off any longer on his own. And if she never even comes to refuse him, then she’s exposing him regardless, without letting him explain himself, his plans, to her. Without letting him do what he came to do, what he’s doing all of this for.

_Unless…_ he thinks. _Unless I pull this off until the end._

Whether she takes the bait or forces him to swallow his own, there is one thing—only one thing—that he can gain from this. If he’s done his job so terribly, pushing her further away, then there’s no point in continuing to pretend. Why not _become_ what he’d always been to her; what she still thinks he is? Why not give in to the nightmares? Won’t, after all, torturing humans just for the sake of it give him unrestrained joy?

The Master drops his red marker back into the pencil holder and sighs deeply.

He should have never remained in France for the entire siege. Nights brought him, without an inkling of compassion, visions of what he had always had to push down into his best hidden core. He stood in the midst of a war for the person he loves, to return her back to who she is, turning himself into the shadow he used to be… _wishing_ with all of his hearts to become that shadow again. At least the burden of choosing to not care, to care when no one sees, when the self is otherwise busy, weighed less within him than the efforts he was putting into not giving in into it.

He had fought it off nobly, until Charles, France’s dauphin. Until she had taunted him with the death he craved and couldn’t have but could bring onto others. He’d tasted again that control he could hold over a life, a privileged, powerful life that would change the world if severed too early, and he’d tried to compare it, with a knife to Charles’s throat, to the historical relevance of saving Joan of Arc, whose life _was_ severed too early and thus inspired others who would come after her. So many he had killed and saved during the fighting, so many he knew he shouldn’t, because it would affect one string here or there, but he could, so he did. Why would Charles VII be any different? Why would the whole of humanity?

He loves the Doctor enough to still let her answers to those questions drive him forward. But for how much longer? For her, he could wait. But the Doctor keeps leaving him. And there are forces at work in his life that sometimes tug harder than her, that never went away when she was by his side, and that now pulse stronger than ever because she’s gone, because she might never come back, and because he’s as alone, as hopeless, as he used to be in her shadow, in her stellar trail.

It’s been so infinitely hard not to get sucked back into the old cycles of evil. Two years, he has resisted. _I know why I can’t anymore_ , he forces himself to think first, then a second thought emerges on its own, _but I was really good at playing the game_.

And yet… the beauty of it is that he could still be. If he succeeds in his mission, he will fight it as long as he has to, as hard as it gets. For her, with her. Because that’s how it has to be. If he doesn’t… it will be his treat to himself, his fall back into his past. She has lost herself, why can’t he as well?

If the Doctor does not come to him this time, he will complete this new plan regardless. He will lose her entirely, when she sees what he is ready to do this time, what limits he will push through. She will not forgive him for meddling this way with human lives, as if they were mere cells to manipulate. He will be exactly what she thinks of him.

And it will feel so good to witness human fear for him and yet still know it is nothing compared to hers.

He shivers on his feet as he imagines it, the course of his own craving, taking root inside his veins and hearts. Louder, louder, it resonates in cavities where sound has not existed in too long. Just like in his old dreams, his body readies for a war of his own making, a pitiful conflict that goes on and on in time and space, when millions die elsewhere every day. And isn’t this who he is, someone who just looks away and kills a few million more to _feel_ something?

Another languid hum comes through from the very soul of his TARDIS that catches him almost about to dance on the spot to a music only he can hear. This TARDIS has never hummed, not to him, not to the Doctor.

“Nothing I have done here in France has ever worked my way,” he says out loud. To the machine, to himself. To the juxtaposition of both, a sentient ship that judges, that part of his mind that still slightly refuses this, enough that the guilt is shining through. “Time to try something else!” Now, he does twirl on the TARDIS’s metal floors. “Something so old, so sorely missed… There will be no better reasons this time, no merciful agenda. Only the suffering of those who are not me.”

He giggles, but the TARDIS hums louder this time. He hears it, in a noise that speaks no language, and it almost stops him. Nothing can, not now, not anymore. He has decided it.

“Time to play with human genetics a bit!” he announces grandiosely, as he gets the machine ready for takeoff. “And give that old friend of mine a fair warning before her beloved race falls prey to illness and calamity!”

* * *

The best part about it is that hardly anyone is broadcasting the news. When research confirmed actual data years ago that Neanderthal genes had survived, the general public didn’t get flashes of news in bright red. He enjoys the subtleties inherent to turning that fact up a notch into chaos. Now, with his anonymous contribution that soon there could be diseases specifically engineered to target those with the so-called genes, all the news did was side-line it. He didn’t necessarily need anything more.

It was so easy to sneak into a lab to fiddle with human toys so that when the final product was made, the deadly produce distributed, the blame would fall on innocent shoulders while he rose glorious from the ensuing catastrophe. All security measures are set so that intruders cannot violate them on the way in, but none of them are ever envisioned with a TARDIS in mind. And his machine sets off no sensors.

In the dark of the lab, with only some outdoor streetlight coming in from the windows to his right, the Master is hunched over a metal desk, surrounded by the last test tubes of his experiment. It is almost ready. His hands shake in something too heavy to be just excitement, and too bright to be just anticipation of foreign suffering.

A bolt of lightning crosses the sky, its electrifying waves of pure glow bursting into a beam that illuminates the room, casts him in shadow, and for a single second sheds shape and contour into a silhouette to his left that he had not noticed there before.

Black and white… and yellow.

“The world has always been your playground,” the Doctor remarks in the most indifferent tone, as the light dies down, repurposing her back into another shadow.

He doesn’t need a single lamp on in the room, after she has spoken, to _see_ her. She’s here, against all odds and proving that every hope he’d discarded in his lowest moments would have been prudent to hold on to. The energy that has bound them for millennia glimmers like a pathway, a sonar of more than just earthly senses, of thoughts he can no longer push onto the parts of him that succumbed to apathy. He can follow the mental brush of her as easily as he would a red line tying their fingers together, even when she has burrowed deep inside her the same ability to. The Doctor has come for him now, and this changes everything.

It should.

He straightens his back as he faces her, putting his hands into his vest pockets. The smile he puts on for her in this moment must resemble none of all those smiles he tried to speak through to her with in France. His every muscle means it far more than his logical exploitation of the gesture ever could.

“To what world are you referring?” he only says, calmly.

“This one. They call it ‘world’, not planet, because they think they’re the only ones. Or they wish they could be.” The Doctor pauses. “It makes them feel important.”

“And I play with them.” The Master raises his eyebrows. “On them, perhaps, this time?”

“You always have. And we both know why.”

It hardly is debatable that she has always been the reason for his targeted attacks to Earth. Even this one, this final attempt to get her back or lose her forever. He would like to stop wondering which is winning.

The Master clears his throat.

“You didn’t see to Joan’s imprisonment with me as I offered,” he says, changing the subject, his tone softer than intended. “Why?”

Her brow dips in a long frown at the question.

Over time, he hasn’t failed to notice her negative reactions to it. With so many whys left unanswered inside her, the nothingness must beg with ferrous insistence to be filled.

He goes to lean on the metal desk with his right arm, a wince prickling his face as his own weight pushes on his shoulder.

“Does it still hurt?” she asks quietly. Her tone matches his, as does her intent to change the subject, circle around the elephant in the room until she has turned it invisible.

Some distance still separates them, as neither has walked closer to the other. It seems to shorten itself every time he dares to span over it with his gaze to meet her silhouette.

“It’s okay,” he quickly says. “It was worth it.”

Because no cost was too high if it would help him get her back inside her own head, back into his life, he did what he did. All of it.

All of it, but not this last great deed today. This… was about to take on an entirely different role. And she’ll probably never know… if she plays her cards the way he had hoped, time ago, she would.

“It shouldn’t hurt,” she says.

“No…” he says. He doesn’t mean the wound. “No, it shouldn’t. But it does. And I guess that’s on you.” He looks her in the eye, across the distance and the darkness and the pain in his hearts that can’t go away because it’s ingrown. “Why didn’t you do your duty, Doctor? Why don’t you do what you have to? So many times you could have. Right now, you still could.”

He smiles to himself and picks up a test tube, longingly looking at its perilous content.

“If you let me run this time, you know what’s to become of your favorite species. They’ll fall ill, one by one, and then the survivors will try and fail to make something capitalizable out of the situation until the Earth withers from the inside out.”

“Except you won’t do it.”

“Mmmm, yes, I will?”

“So then why wait to do it? Posting a fake paper online before actually doing anything, that’s smart,” she mocks him. “You wanted to be caught. You always do.”

“I’m telling you right here that I will do it. That I will push past you and end civilization on Earth, so…” He crosses his arms. “Why are you still defying your orders? Why are you here _again_ , refusing them?” A satisfied grin escapes his lips. “I’d have thought you’d have long ago sentenced me to my fate in Gallifrey. I’m pretty sure you meant to.”

He _knows_ he’s not wrong. He left enough pieces for her to unravel and fit together into a coherent story. He saved her life, he didn’t kill even though he ached to, he was confusing to her on purpose. Whenever she landed before him, she left after, and her next appearance was worth a little less to him.

Nearing his own self-destruction to cope with it is all he has left. If she walks off now, if she tries anything, he still can bring it down onto the world and himself. That possibility is the only thing keeping him going.

“Not anymore,” the Doctor finally says.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Not. Anymore. Do you need it written down, Koschei?” She mockingly uses his Academy days name for him. To remind him of the failures he swallowed in the shadow of her accidental brightness, then. “I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But… not anymore.” She throws her hands up in defeat. “You win.”

“You do know why. Say it to me. Now,” he orders. “Why are you doing this? Why are you betraying your people, your honor? You have to tell me why, sweetheart. Come on.” In her silence, in his pushing, he shouts: “Come on!”

“Because!” The Doctor yells back. “Because it doesn’t make sense.” She pants for breath, looking into his eyes once, then lowering her own gaze. “Why would you build up a bubble, trap a planet inside itself, lead a fleet, if you’re stuck on Earth playing games with human beings?”

She paces on the spot, she twirls and turns, hands in the air gesturing alongside her words. And all he can think is: _finally._

“All this time, it’s just… Nothing back there adds up. To anything. There aren’t that many Daleks, but no one in power is lifting a finger to stop the few that do cause damage. The engineers have blueprints on the bubble, dated from a long time ago. Longer than they told me it had been there. And I’m just…” She breathes in a couple of times, trying to calm herself. “I fought in the desert before the bubble. I _remember_. What I saw, what I saw _done—_ I do what I have to do, when it’s right, but I never once _felt_ anything like this in…”

She doesn’t hesitate to face him completely now, eyeing him with such lack of reservation that he can only breathe easy, knowing _finally_ she is there.

“Why am I so angry?” she half-wails out to him, even though the question is not for him. It’s just the mirror of her whys and voids, given a voice and a space. “You didn’t kill a soul in France that wasn’t historically dead, and you’ve left me _clues._ Clues!” She sneers. “If you planned on enraging me, good job. Because there’s no way you could have intended anything else. You can’t have. You wouldn’t have waited for me to perform!” She giggles nervously, loudly, to herself. She tugs down at her hair. “If you’d built the bubble, you would have _run away._ And I could never have found you. But I did. I have. And at home people keep dying because no one does anything, because they’re all _running away_ from something I can’t see. It all goes on no matter what anyone does. No matter what I do. Like I’m trapped in…”

The Master approaches her now. Even if she has tried to keep her tone as relaxed as possible, this is the most vulnerable he has seen her… since Bristol.

The shell is cracking, he has to be careful with the creature within.

“…a bubble,” he finishes.

“Something is wrong. With them, with me. Maybe both. And I think you know what. I think you can help me.”

Even when asking for his aid, she remains tense, she remains breathing as far away from him as she can, ready to pounce and bounce… It forces him to shut his eyes momentarily so he won’t cry out of time in front of her.

Right when he had given up on his mission and love, she once again flows into his life to remind him why he can never go back. He would have betrayed so much if he had infected humanity with a past that could kill them all… Something would have died inside him and her both that even regeneration itself could never bring back.

“I can,” he just says. His entire stance changes. “I can help you.” He no longer means any harm, he no longer thinks himself capable of much more than whispers and mutters in the dark. “And I’m sorry. It’s going to hurt.”

He mutters, whispers a ‘sweetheart’—a mere reflection, an ellipsis of sound—that she isn’t meant to hear or understand. It’s nothing more and nothing less than his hearts, breaking audibly for her in the shape of words.

It is now that the tears begin to stream down his eyes. She may interpret what she will out of it. He’s too tired to pretend any longer, he has walked the road he started until the very end.

“Perhaps it’d be better if—” he says. He passes a hand over his eyes in an attempt to disguise his tears and his weariness.

“No,” she says as she advances on him, quick as the storm outside and a thousand times mightier, until his stomach stirs up—hard—into his chest. “You don’t get to decide any of that. Tell me, and tell me now. No second locations.”

He regards her quietly, measuring her response far beyond the physical. This will be more costly than fracturing a planet. This is fracturing a life, tearing it open, and hoping it’s strong enough to sew itself back together with time.

“Be very sure, Doctor. Please.”

She’s silent to his suggestion, so he has no real choice but to go on. This is how she breaks out of her bubble… or how he breathes a new one, its walls narrower, harder than the last, into it.

“Do you remember when you killed me—” The Master blinks a couple of times before he adds nuance to his question. “ _How_ … you killed me?”

She nods.

Even if aware that something is not right, she has no reason to suspect her reality. It is him that has to transition her out of the web of lies into terrible fact. His hands begin to shake subtly at the painstaking instantaneity of the notion. His voice was long lost to that before.

“That’s good. Do you remember where we were?”

“Matrix chamber.”

He gulps a few times, wishing there was an easy way to do this, wishing he could just reach over to her and break down with her like they did during that long summer in Bristol, letting time and space collapse in on each other if that’s ultimately what they are to do without supervision.

“Have you ever been told about… the full capabilities of the Matrix,” the Master continues, “beyond mere storage or pattern-recognition?”

In her eyes, the truth already begs to be spoken. She may have always known, unwillingly, where it was impossible for her to realize she did. She just needed to _find out_ again.

“Memory tampering…” she mumbles, hoping so hard to be wrong that he considers for a brief second just lying and saying she is, if only to at least give her back the purpose this will entirely rob her of. A hundred lives wouldn’t be enough to ever move on from his confirmation. She glares at him like it was all his fault, he’s almost thankful. “What did they do to me?”

“I don’t know for sure,” he says honestly. “Deletion, reorganization, most likely. You killed me. My Doctor…” His voice breaks. “She—she wouldn’t have. Not unless lives had depended on it.”

He gives a weak cackle at the memory of a Doctor, older than this, threatening him with a gun because his own influence in the war was indeed putting lives at risk.

“Don’t you for one second _dare_ —” she hisses.

“You’ve killed me twice. That was only the second time. That’s how I know. You had reasons the first time.”

The Doctor almost growls at him, then bites her fist and tries to hide from him, even in the dark, only to face him again seconds later with the momentum of comets as lightning strikes again, and he sees in her face everything she’s furiously struggling to verbalize.

“But _why_?” she almost pleads. After all, after the truth, it all still comes back to that question. It must be killing her. “Why would they _do_ that? Why would they lie? I would have helped, if they’d asked. In my head, I _did_. I _came back_ for them. I—”

He doesn’t know how or where to begin. She has probably realized now that the memories she has of coming back from the desert wars to the dome are not real. If she won’t sit down for the rest of it, then he will. His chest, his back, his legs… Everything has gained the density of stars in the past few minutes. He welcomes the cold neutral touch of the desk beneath him.

“They did ask you, you said no, so they… did this to force you back into the war. You just can’t _remember…_ ” he finishes bitterly.

She ponders his words, then, because of course his one mistake wouldn’t escape her.

“Back?” the Doctor asks.

He has to make efforts not to hunch over in defeat.

“So it’s happened before?” He just nods. He can’t do anything more right now. “But that means… I must have lost…”

“The whole war,” he confirms. “And a… substantial amount after that.”

“We won it…”

“Not exactly…”

He supposes he has to tell her now. There is no point in keeping her memories away from her any longer. He doubts she’d agree to a mental connection in her state, so close to rage he should fear her, not cower from his own choices in her presence. The spoken word, once again, will be his only ally in this fight.

“There was another Gallifrey, entirely free of the bubble; there was the same of this war. I betrayed you, just like you may possibly remember.” He lets himself smile minimally at that. “You found out about something. Something the Council was planning. Ascension, they called it. They were going to break out of their physical forms and let their consciousness rampage with the universe in their glory, letting the hordes of enemies feast on our people, defenseless and alone, meanwhile. You found a way to stop it all, the war, and… you were successful.”

“That’s impossible. Time Wars cannot end unless the epicenter—”

“The Moment, Doctor,” the Master surrenders it almost in reluctance. “You used the Moment on our home planet to burn it all down.” He doesn’t need to say anything more. Yet he must. “This is why you’re angry, why you’re so tired. You’ve been going on longer than your mind can acknowledge, fighting so many wars you’ve lost everything a few times over. This one, you’ve been in twice, and that can only weigh heavy. After all, you’ve never been a simple pawn in any of them, have you?”

He regards her with the compassion of a vanquished mortal in an unfathomable, untamable vastness, because he knows that weight himself, if in different ways.

Her face collapses into the core emotions of a star about to burst into deadly energy. After the longest time, light shines in her eyes again, dangerous and powerful.

“Is anything I remember about you true at all?” she asks, almost hisses.

And this, he thinks, is the question he was waiting for her to ask him. The question he doesn’t very well know how to answer.

“I did betray you, that much is… accurate. But as soon as I watched the first city fall under the Daleks’ fire, I fled. All the subsequent planning I did to destroy Gallifrey, I partook in from afar.” He breathes in slowly. His confession has never painted him in the best of lights. And now, it may ruin this further, but it’s the right thing to come clean with it. “I didn’t really care about what happened, I just wanted a part in it.”

“In my head, you’re a traitor still, a traitor twice. But you tried to do things in France that the person I _know_ never would. So who have you become?”

“An idiot in a box,” he replies. She frowns at him. Even in the early times of the war that are all she has now, she understood that to be her, not him. “Who has been waiting all this time for you to ask me what you were constantly asking yourself. Because, like I told you in France, I do have the answers.”

“You never meant to harm anyone.” She’s not asking. “It was all to get me here, to get me talking, to get me _wondering._ ”

He has to look her in the eye, scantily illuminated by the storm raging outside in the far-off distance, and swallow the truth. That if she hadn’t called his bluff, he might have killed Charles to push her. That if she hadn’t shown up here today, millions of humans might have suffered in the name of the hole she left behind that he has been entirely useless to refill with anything but pain.

“I was really good at playing the game, Doctor. But—” And the Master smiles sadly, looking down at the floor tile, “—not good enough to fool you. And in the end… that’s what counts. Yes,” he says to himself. A few tears leave their concealment without him trying in the slightest to hide them anymore. He knows she notices but is saying nothing, unsure about where _they_ are, time-wise. Unsure of how to hate him anymore. “That’s the only thing that really counts.”

Her entire face hardens up.

“How do I know any of this is true?,” she says. “How do I know it’s not another one of your old I-want-attention plots? You’ve always wanted to overthrow the Council, the President. This gives you the perfect window of opportunity. With me on your side and not theirs, you could kill them all, reign supreme after.”

The Master sighs, tired.

“Times change. So does what we want.” He breathes in to calm himself. “I must admit it has been a while since I had my eye on Gallifrey…”

“I can’t know if you’re… I can’t know for _sure_. I’m still the one tasked to take you back, I won’t be able to lie for you any longer. I have to report back soon with news of where you are and why I haven’t been able to arrest you yet.”

That warms him for a brief second, the brief second he allows himself to realize she must have had doubts for a pretty long time if she has gone so far as to _lie_ for him, maybe even to protect his new identity and location. Anything beyond that cools down in on the cold hard fact that even so, even now, she’s hesitant.

“The second you bring me in and they get what they want, the bubble will be destroyed, the Council will ascend, Doctor, and war—true war—will fall back onto the planet before they bring destruction to the entire universe with their ascension,” he quickly says. “I may not have political interest in Gallifrey anymore but… I’m not indifferent to what happens to the people living there, losing their homes and their families to tyrants.”

They both remember the Paris camp into which he snuck to talk to her. They both remember what was spoken in hiding and tiredness.

“I can’t trust this. Or you. I need proof,” the Doctor says after a long while.

He gets up from the table with a long breath.

“I know,” he says. “Which is why… if you truly want to take me back, this time I will go with you. I just want this war to be over for once and for all. Everywhere in the universe.” He swallows slowly. “I have nothing to hide from you, not anymore. And I have no fear of the Time Lords.”

He knows she has been utterly paralyzed by those words, and by the accidental honesty they exude. He will do it, he realizes. It’s more than meaning it, he’s making a promise to her that may kill them both. A gamble, his greatest one yet. To save her soul, he must risk it first. He must let her weigh the threat of it all and decide if she trusts him enough not to risk it in the end.

The Master she thinks she knows would never sacrifice himself, not even over the _truth._ Or to cover his own lies. In the end, he thinks that might have ultimately made the final difference between the reality she has believed until now and the narrative she’s trusting is real despite having come from him. In her head, she doesn’t know the Master who is ready to sacrifice it all for no other reason than to _try_.

“ _Definitive_ proof,” the Doctor corrects her previous statement, but her tone is, for the first time, not as serious, and more resembling of the child he remembers getting lost in labyrinths with.

He replies with a smirk, a cocky, “And how am I supposed to do that?”

“You’ll think of something.”

He immediately remembers the letters on her graveyard inside her own TARDIS, which this version of her does not even know about. The Doctor only just began digging empty graves of past and present times long after the Time War, when the pain of it all returned to settle within.

Her eyes meet his again.

“Just… how do I know you’re not just running away if I let you go?” she asks.

“You don’t. You can’t. You’re just going to have to believe me.”

He has missed looking at her without a fight as their excuse, as their reason. Hope resurfaces in him like the first breadth of energy in a newborn star.

She adamantly stays in the light, her eyes the last ember of everything spoken here today, then she waits for the storm’s intermittent quietude to merge a little further into the darkness, where it is impossible for him to see her, to feel her, anymore.

“There’s something I have to do first.” Her voice comes through regardless, invitingly accurate as to her position in their shared space where light has not been.

“Do what you have to do,” he replies. “Meet me back here afterwards, I’ll take you to your definitive proof.”

“Wait for me, don’t go anywhere,” she says it like an order he has no choice but to follow. As if he would disobey. As if he could.

She is already gone from all sight and darkness around him when he mutters into the room:

“Where would I go…?”

And yet still, she hears.

The waves of surprise his last words stir in her continue to course up and down her back in an eternal tide well after she unlocks the TARDIS doors to return home. In the dulling night heat of Gallifrey, the Doctor shivers slightly under her own jacket, and that is not entirely owed to what she has just been told. She had never actually given much thought to how much of home they both had lost— _he_ had lost. At least she still has fragments of it to return to, even if under certain conditions. It’s time now to set her own.

A whole day has gone by here since she left. If she was coming back with news, she wouldn’t have traveled that far into the night, but at this hour the only people she’ll meet from the TARDIS port up into the engineers workshop are soldiers doing rounds, their long faces as dull as the weather. The few she does pass don’t think to stop her, to ask where she is going, to escort her into the Council chamber, for which she’s thankful—nothing further from her current intentions than to pay anyone in the Council a visit now.

Once inside the workshop, she loses herself easily into the mindless tasks that she left unattended before leaving. Tossing her jacket onto a desk, unstrapping herself free off her suspenders, the Doctor kneels on rough metal floors by a couple of Dalek carcasses and gets to work.

She’s contorted herself onto a crouch in order to try and get a few stray blues tubes from the inside of one, elbow-deep already in grease and fluids, when Gat walks in, despite the hour.

“Any developments?” Gat asks, leaning on the wall by the open archway that acts as main entrance to the workshop.

The Doctor removes her hands from the guts of the dead Dalek and cleans them off on its outer shell, shaking them off a little afterwards as well.

“I think I’ve almost got something,” she says, wrinkles her nose as she looks up at Gat. “How’s… everything else?”

“Everything outside the Citadel’s dome remains unarmed and unaided,” Gat says, crossing her arms. “A few more deaths have been recorded in a northern town. Unofficially, you know… All eyes are still on you.”

The Doctor looks at her for one second and then gets up to her feet slowly. She dusts off her hands again on her thighs.

“Yeah, well, we’re going to have to do something about that,” she says, despite herself.

They can’t let children die at the mercy of a murderous race’s last attempts at lashing out inside a shared cage. Even if they have to die twelve times, the final death still comes for them all. And the Daleks have always been relentless in their attacks. A planet without children is a dead planet, even on Gallifrey, where most rules are bent a little.

Maybe it’s time she bent her own to save them. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.

She reaches out for some discarded panels by a wall and one of the toolboxes. She hauls it all onto a desk, spreads the layers of metal and alloy over the surface, over blueprints she doesn’t need for this. Gat makes a small, surprised noise by the door.

“Are you going to just stand there?” the Doctor tells her. “You’re the engineer.”

Gat chuckles to herself a few times, then, but she does approach the desks to begin prepping the material with her.

For a while, that is all they do. Little is spoken between them aside from short instructions to change a few details here and there on the model of weapon they’re designing, building it from scratch so that the people out there in the desert have something to fight off the enemy with. The Doctor never thought she would use guns for her own purposes again, but she has in the past, so what difference does it make to bring them to people, too, so they won’t die defenseless? The stars know the Daleks are hardly to be reasoned or negotiated with, especially if they’re feeling trapped.

At some point, Gat gets up from her own desk and joins the Doctor, who has not wanted to sit down yet, and is working by a taller table, trying to figure out the correct position of some cables.

“There’s been some talk around Gallifrey for a while… about… some changes…” Gat says casually. Her eyes are most definitely on the tools and materials directly in front of her.

But the Doctor does look up at her.

“You know the answer to that is yes,” she replies in the same manner as Gat. “You knew the second you came to me for the first time.”

“The first time, Doctor, I thought you’d help us fight. But this… is an entirely different matter.”

“I know. I accept it,” she says. “No one should be dying. Not for something as petty as arrogance or tradition.”

“Tradition…” Gat repeats.

That is what is being dismantled here, not Daleks, not weapons to be rearranged again. Tradition, the deep-settled laws of the Time Lords in the Council. The Doctor suspected the intent in Gat from the beginning, because all obedient followers to the Council would never stop to question their decision to remain inactive outside the dome. But Gat hesitates very little in showing her anger.

However in secret, however big of a spiral it is, now that it’s out there, the Doctor feels more at ease about every choice she made today after being told that the life she thought she’d lived is as much a manufacture as the weapons in her hands.

She wonders, idly, as the two of them fall back into work, if she should come clean to Gat about the truth, especially now that they have silently agreed to bring down the government. If the Council truly erased her real life, the memories of a national hero, a universally known figure, what won’t they have done to the population of the planet whose deaths they are too indifferent about to officially keep records of?

* * *

He supposes he has a makeshift lab inside his TARDIS now, containing the recipe to play with history in the most literal sense of the word. Not with time, with _history._ Humans of old waiting to be birthed out of the genes of modern humans at the press of a button, at the thrust of a glass tube against a surface. Every last piece of evidence that might have connected the institution he had previously snuck in to precisely blame them after has been thoroughly removed now. He can keep it, as a reminder of how close he was, and how good it felt until it didn’t. A summary of the past two thousand years in the simplest terms of any language.

For fifteen minutes he stood in the light of the storm, in the darkness of the lab room, holding up a vial between left thumb and forefinger and wondering what would happen if he inoculated his wondrous killer recipe onto himself. Would he become a hybrid of races long dead that have yet somehow still survived time?

Now, he waits by an uncamouflaged TARDIS and its open doors for the tell-tale roar of engines pushed to their limits. No other TARDIS in the world groans like that. The Doctor has always liked to make an entrance, but either to condition her adversaries to fear her over time because of the noise or to build up hope in the hearts of the people she comes in the aid of, the Master never quite seems to understand. Maybe the Doctor’s just filling the silence that corrodes her within with the only sound the universe has ever known to be larger than life, in all versions of reality.

When it finally surges out of the vortex, making pieces of paper swirl in the air and stirring the Master’s short hair as if a small cyclone had landed before him, his hearts rouse from their slumber, and they thrive with every beat as the Doctor’s TARDIS, blue as only it can be, fully materializes in front of him.

The doors open, humming mechanical noises filter through into the tight air of the lab, and the Master breathes them in as if they were air. He knows that when the Doctor exits her box, that air will be lacking everywhere. When the Doctor does, it is.

“Show me,” she only says to him.

“Not here.”

As soon as the night is over, this lab will belong to the humans again, and the last thing he wants is for anyone to find two TARDISes there while he and the Doctor struggle to understand each other one door away from their curiosity, their fear, and their closed minds.

“Where, then?”

“Anawin. A twin planet in the Hypatia system, not too far away from here. Every lifeform on the planet gets exterminated in the future,” he says. “There, I’ll be able to… show you without any danger of getting interrupted halfway through.”

He tells her the coordinates leading far enough into the future so they’ll skip entirely the alien invasion that annihilated all its population. She merely nods in agreeance, seeing nothing wrong with his proposal. Anawin means nothing to her now, like this. And yet it still means everything to him. Anawin is the last he ever saw of the Doctor that saved him without ever even knowing.

“Alright, come with me,” she says with a curt nod, so he’ll know to follow her inside her TARDIS.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to fly there on my own. I wouldn’t want to leave my ship behind.”

He doesn’t need it for this. What he’s hoping will definitely change her mind has always awaited in the Doctor’s TARDIS. But the thought of being stranded again, without her, without a way out, without hope…

The Doctor’s expression remains impassive.

“Just trust me. For this last trip,” he tells her. “Trust the pattern of these last two years.”

“Don’t ask me to trust you, because I can’t.”

“Believe me, then.”

Simple as ever, the Master’s words hover in the air between them until she breathes in and out a couple of times, louder than usual, her fingers pushed together into fists as if she were battling between what she thinks she knows and what she wants to believe in.

“If I find out you’re the one that’s lying to me…” she replies in the end.

“You can,” he adds quickly. “Right now.”

He grabs for her hands, lifts them up until they’re practically brushing his temples.

“I have nothing to lose anymore. I’ve already lost _every_ thing,” he mutters wetly to her.

He lost her. She was the only everything he was counting on never losing.

She glares and glares into his eyes. Her breathing picks up in speed, in fury. For a moment, she does press her fingers onto his temples, and she closes her eyes. But that’s how long moments last. A breath. When he feels the fire of her gaze on his again, he realizes it will never be that easy. They’re both too stubborn.

“No. I believe you,” she says. Her hands fall down from his face. “It’s a _choice_. Now it’s your turn to prove to me it’s the right one.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works…” he says, almost amused.

“Yes, it is,” she says, raising her eyebrows at him to hammer the point home, “it always has been.”

She then walks back into her box without another word.

He sighs longingly and gets inside his own TARDIS as well.

* * *

The first time the Doctor took him there, he didn’t understand. The Doctor had just turned up with Clara at the Master’s hotel, and neither of them had known very well how to deal with the gap between realities, between their shared past and their promise to share a now. So the Doctor had just held his hand, tugged at him, and taken him in, deep into the corners where others better than them have often gotten lost just for daring to take a peek. And when the Doctor had let him in, the Master had understood. There has never really been a gap. Where he had built a hotel to mourn the deaths he’d caused and let the people affected by it do the same, the Doctor had dug graves to remember what her finite memory couldn’t forever.

Master and Doctor, unable to let go, unwilling to ever try.

Now, the Master is the one to lead the Doctor in, past the corners the TARDIS knows to hide from those who should never see. Fleetingly, the Master worries the heart of this old machine won’t think this Doctor is fit for her own secrets. But, as they approach the right spot in silence, his doubts dissipate when the TARDIS shows the entrance to them without fanfare or noise.

His hand trails over a piece of wall, carefully. He means it as a thank you to the soul beneath the machine, for making him feel a little less alone in this act of pure loneliness, sheer bareness of the self.

“This is it…” he simply says to the Doctor.

She doesn’t hesitate, although by the frown on her face, permanent by a few minutes already, he supposes she must be hesitant to some degree.

Past the archway awaits the only testament and record of those she has lost. She kept it hidden under lock and key, even from herself during happy times; she wiped stone clean of any wear; let flowers grow free around them, on the patches of seemingly infinite grass; and brought letters to contain every last thought she could never voice otherwise in front of a tomb. His entire self nears collapse at the thought that it might not look like much to her now, in a state of semi-abandonment. This room is all that she is when she’s not busy pretending, when she is allowed to collapse herself.

A few steps on the grass, still lively and healthy under the artificial light installed to mimic a sun’s, and he thinks to himself that it might not be a bad place to collapse in, all in all.

The Doctor takes the lead, inspecting the room with the slow, careful tread of someone who expects a trap somewhere along the line. Nothing in her betrays her cold exterior, regardless. Black, white, and that rigid posture that it took years of traveling, of seeing beauty and chaos merge into life and death, for the universe to gently coax out of her old bones. It’s almost sadder than the journey she’s forgotten, the moment in which, from behind, he witnesses that posture crumble slowly once she stands before names written on stone that mean something to her even after she has been brainwashed. Names from before the war that the Council knew not to erase.

He watches her crouch by the names of her first children. Those who died, those who forgot, those who moved on, and those who might have still grown to live on the new Gallifrey if she had acted earlier. When she buried their tombs here, she thought them dead. Now, she doesn’t know they might be. Now, she’s fighting for their lives—mere shadows to the present she isn’t aware of—in a Citadel that only protects highborns. Because she was never a true noble herself, always disinterested in the politics of the Time Lords, none of her children ever inherited the privilege of a protection dome. Their legacy was something else—the wisdom and power to confront oppression, the knowledge of years to survive.

The Doctor turns her head to the left so he’ll hear her, a few steps behind to give her some privacy.

“How did you know this was here?” she mutters.

The grass softens his every footstep when he comes closer.

“You trusted me with its location once, as I trusted you with my own version of this graveyard.” He looks around at the impossible horizon of blue walls mimicking a sky until he finds an empty tomb in particular. “Some of these, we dug together.”

He had been there by her side the day she’d engraved an epitaph onto Clara Oswald’s gravestone. In golden, circular Gallifreyan, under Clara’s name and her date of birth, she had debossed: _the impossible girl._

“Why?” he’d asked.

“She lived and died for me many times, and yet… all this time I still believed she’d be impossible enough to never leave me.”

And that has always been the trouble of such a long life intersecting with the brevity humans call existence. Impossibility takes on different definitions and, at the end of the day, it crashes and burns and kills everything in sight except those truly aware of it.

“How many lives?” the Doctor asks now through gritted teeth, still down on the grass, still facing the tomb of the first person she lost, the first person she remembers losing.

“In your head,” he says, “you must be still be on your… eighth. So six more.”

“This is the… _result_ of six more lives,” she says.

“It’s what happens when you associate yourself with humans, Doctor,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Humans, like all mortal species, die. They pile up in cemeteries and in our consciences.”

“This doesn’t prove you’re telling me the truth. We were both in France for quite some time. You’re smart enough, you could have snuck in here, fused something to biohack the lock, and—”

He rolls his eyes in exasperation. Then, he remembers. He remembers what it must feel like for her to be told her future is filled with death without a chance for her to do a single thing about it. And his exasperation turns into pain that she’s unable to believe when it hurts and that he’s in denial about pushing through harder than he already is.

“And what? Installed this whole thing before you could see it? Made it all up?”

“Yes! You would know all their names, you met some of them… And some of these I don’t even—”

“I _never cared_ about their names. Not until recently.” He breathes out to steady himself. Where is the softness he needs now? “Alright, fine.”

He could argue, verbally incite her to follow, bait her so she’ll believe by opposing every last thread of make-believe possibility she can think of, but he’s done. She believes already, it’s clear by every last thing she has done today. She just needs to choose to accept it.

He walks on his own to the one grave he pretends doesn’t exist. It’s the one that will never host a body in present nor in future. Tradition would prevent it, so would circumstance. This is the one grave in the entire room that she was skittish about showing to him. When she did, she tried to laugh it off. Maybe he should have laughed with her, now that he thinks about it.

It’s the only tombstone that is engraved just in Gallifreyan.

Because it’s his tombstone.

“You’ve got to be kidding me…” she mutters angrily behind him.

So she has followed him anyway, as he supposed she eventually would, and now she has seen the inscription… and the letters, neatly folded into small piles, which no breeze could ever blow away.

She stands next to him, before the only testimony he could ever think to show her, to prove to her they weren’t always just enemies, and she is breathing so angrily he can actually hear the air rustle in and out of her lungs.

“The child I knew who bore that name died in the Academy,” she remarks.

“Then why keep this here?” he says. “Why write to me after?”

But they’re rhetorical questions.

Every letter is from a different time. Some are so old, judging by the quality of the paper and the discoloration of the ink, that they must date back exactly to then. To the day he betrayed her for the first time and, in a way, the last. Some others are written in thin white sheets of paper, proper of modern human times. Some, he could swear are so new he’s pretty sure they weren’t there the last time he walked in here.

The Doctor never replies to him. She picks up a letter, just one, yellow and crisp in her hands, and opens it. He stands close enough to be able to pick out the distinct shapes of her calligraphy, but he isn’t brave enough to read through it all. Those circles, slightly shaky in the old Doctor’s emotional turbulence, feel almost as if that Doctor was here, right now, reading it out loud to him.

She told him, when they were back here together, that she’d written to him when she thought him dead forever. After he’d enslaved the Earth for a year and she had ended it, held him in her arms and forgiven him out loud. After he’d chosen to take a bullet and refuse his regeneration rather than change. It had taken so much more for him to be able to _change_. But, at that point, neither of them could have known. At that point, all he had been able to do was die in her arms, and all the Doctor had been able to do was beg for him not to. She told him, once, that she had burned his body at a wooden pyre and mourned for the friend she’d lost, after, until his death had been reversed.

Time Lords don’t die in a second, they die in the very eternity they pretend to live through. Mourning them entails the same enormity of an eternal task.

_I don’t want to be the last._

_Your parents never liked me much. I wanted to think it was because you were one of them already and I probably would have to fight to be. Did your parents not like me because they could see? Could they see that one day I’d stand over the precipice with you and not be able to get you not to jump off it?_

_Forever. Never. They’re all lies, but they’re beautiful lies. When you hear them for the first time, you want to believe, really believe, that neither will lead you to … say goodbye like I have had to say goodbye to you. Time after time. The deal was we’d be timeless, d’you remember that? Me and you, until the end of time._ _Forced to become adults together, facing death squarely together._

_I wouldn’t have cared, honestly, if it had been a forever made out of confrontation. Or if we’d both been doomed to stab each other in the back until there was nothing to regenerate back to. You’d have liked that, I think. And you’d laugh now… I’m standing here as I once hid in a barn. I’m still afraid, old friend. Afraid of a long night without you. Afraid to die alone without my promise. Afraid of this new forever that I’d had not long ago and that now… tastes so much bitterer in my regained solitude._

In the aftertaste of the excerpts from a long-lost letter of grief, the Master can feel in his own tongue the saltiness of the old Doctor’s tears.

“I must have loved you a lot…” she says, in an unbelieving tone, like she had never given any attention to that thought before. He doesn’t know what to make of her tense yet hardly loud voice, of her incredulity, shaming him just by saying it out loud. “To mourn you so much, for so long.”

And the Master, who has never heard her say the word ‘love’ out loud to a single soul, let alone himself, blanks, freezes, and forgets his own name, the name she wrote on this very piece of paper forever and a half ago just as she did on stone.

“I love _you…_ ” he confesses. That, he can never forget. He can never feel ashamed of it. Not at his age, not after everything. His words are smaller than he intended them in the shadow of her confused rage, burning bright again, if unspoken, if unexpressed. “I always have.”

“You _hate_ me,” she corrects him out of sheer surprise. “You have never known how to do anything except hate me. And everybody else paid the price whenever I wasn’t enough to stop you.”

“I did hate you,” he admits. “For a while. For a while, I did both. And I did both terribly. I just… got tired. So tired, Doctor. Can you understand that? Can you please just—” He breathes out shakily, looks her in the eye. She is as wound up as he is. “—understand what I’m doing enough to believe me?”

All she has to do is realize this is him, this has always been him, trying to restore who she was back to her _because_ he loves her; refusing, terrible as he has been at it sometimes, to become the old Master because he loves who he was with her.

“I’ll never believe you could love me,” she says after a very long while in the grass and the stone and the feelings that rise up to their waists, threatening to flood. He cannot believe his confession is what has resuscitated her anger when he needed her to recall everything except that, and all because she thinks he’s obsessively in love, enough to lie to her about the Council’s treachery. “So if you thought that was the way to appeal to me? Think again. Because there’s nothing to appeal to.” She calls him by his name. “There’s never been anything since you chose your path and I chose mine. And unless something changes right here, right now, at the end of everything, I’ll choose to stand with Gallifrey, not you, regardless of any doubts I might have. Because they’re the ones under siege. And none of this—” She laughs mockingly. “Some letter anyone could have written and a confession, honestly…? None of it can prove to me that you didn’t lay that siege to them. That you’re not doing all of this—the bubble, the lying—to win me back.”

He takes in a rash breath that echoes louder even than her own. She doesn’t understand, and maybe neither did he, that there’s nothing left to win back. There’s nothing left to miss except walking memories of dreadful times.

“I’ll tell you everything I know about the bubble. How you put it up, how I tried to break through, how I can travel back and forth. I’ll tell you everything,” he says, sounding so extremely weak, so extremely finished with this. “And then you can leave. With me, without me. Take your pick. You can tear down the whole of Gallifrey with me inside it for all I care…”

Maybe it had to end this way, with her winning, finally. Had he not said so to her, that she had to stop believing him in order to win? So now she has. Now she has let her own overthinking beat the truth into nonsense. And he will willingly let her beat him into pulp once she’s done.

She stares at him like she doesn’t know him. And that’s every bit the problem. She has no way to know that if she did grab him, drag him out of the TARDIS into the desert and leave him there forever, he’d let her. He’d die the remainder of his deaths in the closest thing he can envision to peace. He’s tried, he’s fallen off the road, he’s returned to it, to finish walking it until the very end. He didn’t count on the road twisting back, ending in the dirt, in the middle of nowhere or right where it began.

In all these years, he’s never actually comprehended yet whether time works in a linear fashion or if it goes on and on in the same circle, never-ending. Time’s just the sea he sails on, the element he molds. It will be his one and only true grave, as it has been his crib and nanny. But what about for her? What will time be for a Doctor who keeps losing strands of it? What will time _do_ to her?

“Please stop confusing me…” she grumbles through her teeth, holding her head up, closing her eyes.

“I’m not trying to,” he mumbles.

He tries to hold her up by an elbow. She doesn’t move away. In her head, she hasn’t felt his touch, this gentle and soothing, in hundreds of years, since she let him go in fear of what they’d become together, and he watched her suffer for that choice from afar.

“For the first time in anything you can remember,” he tells her softly, “I am only trying to…”

He falls quiet. _Trying to prove everything to you so you won’t leave me._ He cannot say those words to her now. Anything but that.

She opens her eyes to confirm what his grip on her elbow already did. He’s still there, very close, waiting for her rebuke or her acceptance. It’s worse than when they were children, because then she had taken the lead by instinct, now he does out of responsibility. And those are rules neither know how to play by.

She crumbles. In the only way the Doctor ever does. Still standing, without a single tear on her, and not betraying in the slightest the anger ever present in her eyes. She crumbles in breath only.

“What have you become?” she says. She says it over and over. “What have you become…?”

She never calls him Master unless he asks. And now he is nameless. A child waiting for a friend to hold his hand. He doesn’t let go of her, even when she lowers her arm. The tips of his fingers slide down to her wrist, where he doesn’t dare but linger, skin on skin.

“Let me tell you,” he begs her, his voice so quiet, so gentle. “It’s all you ever came for.”

“I came for _you._ ”

“I’ll go with you anyway. It’s what they want of me. I’d rather you heard it first, if I’m to die the rest of my deaths in torture until I finally confess. It’s an infinitely small part of your stolen history. But a part all the same.”

She looks him in the eye, without any latent anger threatening to overpour out of her this time. Just many, many questions. She only utters the one. The one that breaks him.

“Why? You said you had the answers. Why me?”

“Revenge,” he says. “Old revenge for trapping them, for refusing to help them, and, I suppose, for… those years in the past when you escaped them time and time again.”

And he decides to just tell her. About thirteen TARDISes saving a planet. About something so impenetrable it took him months to figure out a way in with just one machine without doing damage to anything once it had traveled through the barrier. Nobody knows how to bring the bubble down, she certainly didn’t with her memories still intact. But there are ways around it. And maybe, he says, one of those ways leads to its destruction, if pushed to a limit.

“They won’t be able to do anything with that information,” she says.

“There’s enough TARDISes in the Citadel for them to try anything. Just because you and I can’t do it, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. They did breach it.” Because she has no recollection of the past that led her there, he clears her throat and tries to explain. “To come for you, I mean. First, just some random person in a teleporter, the connection allegedly too fragile for two Time Lords, but not humans. Then, when she returned, she was able to pull you and this TARDIS in. Whatever it is the engineers are up to, they’ve found loopholes, just as I have. And loopholes can grow big enough until they disappear completely.”

“Good,” she says. “That means it’ll take them time, supposing they’re not busy with something else.”

“So… what’s the plan?”

“I’ll have to return, eventually…” she says, but she doesn’t sound all too sure, perhaps about the implications of how she will be coming back. Empty-handed? Enveloped in a lie? And to what? “I’ll have to return having somehow acquired back the knowledge that was taken from me. To show them what to expect of the Doctor of War.” Revenge, then, is the way she is choosing. Not all that different, truth be told, from what she did, once. Not all that different from what _they_ decided to pull on her. “Without reliable memories to draw from, all I’ve let them see in me is a weapon. And I don’t trust you not to use me as one for your own personal schemes. I don’t trust you to tell me the whole truth.”

She looks at him with those big sad eyes that irradiate hidden rage, and he can’t feel anything but despair. How could he have lost her a second time? How can he keep losing her when she’s right there in front of him?

“You’ll need to show me your TARDIS,” she tells him.

He lifts an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because I’m not letting you stay in mine.” His hearts willingly accept the pain that comes with knowing why. “And because if you’ve been running around, undoing history, waiting for me to pop up, you must have evidence in yours that will puzzle the pieces together for me.”

“Certainly…” he mutters.

So she has chosen to find her memories again in order to avenge herself… So be it. It’ll be a long road, perhaps it will be good for her not to walk it alone. And it will be good for him to have her there for however long, he’ll have to force himself not to act like he is.

He is almost thankful to leave the graveyard and exit into the desert, even if it’s only for a few seconds. Then, he remembers what happened in this very planet, miles away, after choices were made and the future was accepted in childishly trusting faith, and nothing can return him to a state of mind he believes in anymore. He just moves forward like a robot, lets her in, and closes the doors after her.

She opens them again, hands in her jacket pockets, when she realizes he isn’t going in with her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she tells him.

“There’s nowhere here for me to go to.” He gestures at the amplitude in the desert. He made sure before to give her the coordinates to an actual wasteland without buildings or towns or even roads lost to time and plagues. Miles and miles away, though, there should still be the hangar where he made the choice that’s changed his entire life afterwards. Where he thought he’d last seen a Doctor who hated him.

“I know,” she says. “But… just in case. In.”

“Fair enough…”

She doesn’t have to repeat it again.

Following her into the depths of his own TARDIS, the Master knows to stay away from the console, so she won’t scold him for allegedly trying to take control, fly them away, and keep her prisoner anywhere. It’s all simpler if he just does as she wants, as she has told herself it’ll be easier for them both.

With an indecipherable expression on her face, the Doctor walks around as she studies every scribbled note on his walls, hanging from threads, connected by threads. Quietly, she stops to read them all. She just stands there, judging her past and his present, for the longest of times. And he feels more exposed than ever in his life. Childish, slapdash, and alone again in the shadow of someone much greater than he could ever strive to become.

Eventually, he cannot bear it. The true simplicity in all of this for him in the end is just to leave her be, as he abandons everything to walk into the deep tunnels, unable to take one second more of that silence, that terrible unveiling of their history without her even recognizing a line of it.

The Doctor doesn’t even follow the way of his footsteps as he does. What for? They both know all too well that there is no way out once one has braved the labyrinthine depths of the TARDIS. And in his many lives he’s certainly trampled into more inescapable depths than this one.

* * *

Nowhere in here makes for a good place to run away. Empty rooms that collect dust better than he’s ever collected fragments of death? The rebuilt matrix and various prototypes for a rift artifact whose only function nowadays is to occupy space? The only place with actual furniture in an entire dimension? Where to hide? He stole all he owns from a yard sale: a table, a few rusty appliances, and a patio couch made of something itchy that now has been covered with a sheet so he can sleep there, whenever he does sleep. He sat with her once on that couch, under the very stars that tonight will pierce the night sky. Holding high hopes that returning to that same spot alone would fix anything hasn’t been his brightest move, and yet it’s all he can do, with her back in the console room.

The memories he mulls over whisper about the uncertain future that awaits him. It’s not about her trusting, or believing. At the end of the day, for the right reasons, at the right time, the Doctor will do both, because she does already, even if she doesn’t want to admit it to herself in the name of personal history. No, it’s about what she’ll _do_ anyway, despite her own beliefs or wishes. And what the Doctor does when pressed further, when asked not to act, when confused and scared, even the Master of lies can never be sure about beforehand.

Yellow walls in a room that stinks of the past have contained him long enough for him to realize both their fates are entirely in her hands and nothing he could ever say or do, including what he already has, will have an impact on whether or not she honors her duty to her people before she honors his word. He stands up again with a short shaky breath. Then, his dread being pushed deep into his hearts, he leaves the yellow of the room behind in search for the orange of the desert outside.

Even from the perpetually dim corridor, he can tell the suns must have set outside; a dullness stains every color in the air that had been otherwise occupied by vibrance when he left the console room, time ago. Carefully, he steps back into it again now.

He hadn’t expected to find it empty. The Doctor must have gone inside at some point as well, without him noticing. It’s an uncomfortable weight in his chest, the surging—if slight—relief at not seeing her here. The last thing he was looking forward to was a confrontation.

Right as he moves past the main console, out of the corner of his eye a single detail catches his attention, freezing him on the spot where he stands the second he understands. The Doctor. Perfectly tucked on her side between metal floor and console, and asleep on her own black jacket, her expression placid and yet still slightly armored with the worry she can’t shake these days. She’s freed herself of her suspenders, and seeing her just in a shirt, the white fabric worn and dirtied by time, has him wondering how physical of an armor she must always don, for it to have crumbled so easily without its outer layers.

She must have tried to keep guard by the door, in case he came back and attempted to escape, but in the exhaustion of the past years, eluding sleep must have been an impossible task, even for the strength and stubbornness that has never once ceased to reside in her.

The Master sighs, hands in his jacket pockets, and tries to figure out a way to safely take her somewhere less…, less impersonal and uncomfortable than the console room’s ugly floors, cold without the engines warming up the place.

He would never get away with carrying her to his couch. She’d wake up when he was halfway there, thrash in his arms and fight him. If she was herself, she’d fight him over who deserves a more comfortable sleeping place more. She already did, once, and he fought _her_ over her right to a comfortable place to exist in until he won. Now he has no choice but to let her be, and if tomorrow she’s still here, he’ll offer her his couch to sleep on. But he can’t just stand there now and watch her take the floor like an animal. He couldn’t then when things were normal, he absolutely could not now that every single second his retinas have to face the image of her, something shatters within him.

In the end, circumstances being what they are now, there is only one thing he can think of doing that she might not refuse.

As he takes off his own purple jacket, he crouches gently next to her, careful not to make a noise, and spreads it over her like a blanket. He lets his hand linger fleetingly on her shoulder when he tucks it around her. A little to the left, her turned head exposes her jaw, her neck, and it takes all of his willpower not to bury his face there on her shoulder and let all his own fear and rage out—his tears crashing against her skin—before she wakes up and pins him down on the floor with murder at the tip of her tongue, on the tips of her fingers.

She stirs, then, her breath profound and rich with that calmness he has missed in her for far longer than just two years.

“Sun gods, hermits…” she mumbles in her sleep. “It reeks… of Time Lord…”

The quiet rocking of dark ocean waves against cliff lines floods his mind. The sound that marked his life for two consecutive bodies.

“Doctor, I—” he mutters wetly. “I was wrong.”

It’s all his fault. And guilt hammers hard against his sternum. It was he who, time and time again and despite her insistence that something was very wrong, maintained that she was just being paranoid. Justly so, but paranoid all the same. And now they’ve lost each other because, ironically, he wasn’t paranoid _enough._

“They weren’t supposed to ever come back…” he sobs quietly. “I overlooked it, I’m sorry.”

In the end, his fingers leave her shoulder to find her hand, cradling it close to his chest, and his tears splotch the surface of her skin with everything he isn’t brave enough to tell her, not even if she’s unable to hear him. And he cries by her side, silent like she had been inside the barn for many nights, afraid of monsters and the future, for an eternity that only time itself could ever decipher. He cries until his tears are cold against his cheeks, against her own skin. He cries until he realizes… the Doctor, this Doctor, doesn’t know she ever said those words that she has just spoken out of a dream.

And if she’s dreaming about it, if she’s _saying_ those words in the refuge of her subconscious, that can only mean… she’s little by little remembering on her own.

_She’s her own answer_ , he thinks. _She always has been._

* * *

The Council sits in silence as the hijacked footage acquired from the Doctor’s visual cortex reaches them in waves of beautiful, much sought-for information. Once the image transitions into something else, the audio muted to footsteps on metal, the feed is cut, and a Council member dares break the silence in the dark chamber.

“Shall I inform the engineers to begin preparations, Lord President?”

Rassilon sits in silence to ponder his answer. Nobody speaks a word about the Doctor’s treason. After all, it was expected, and they had planned consequently for it.

“No,” he finally says. “This shall be a job for pilots. Thirteen of them, apparently. To unwind back what she set into motion.”

Someone in the Council clears their throat before they speak.

“Worrying, isn’t it? All this time and effort put into her, and now not even her and her allies have the necessary knowledge to restore things as they were.”

“Ah, but the Master was right about the most important thing, my lords,” the President says. “Despite their many attempts, and their self-sustained egos, what they know is no match for what we will achieve with precisely the same evidence they have.” Rassilon stands to his feet, hands raised to the ceiling. “Without engineers, without guidelines. Led by nothing more than a fact and a fracture in time and space. The bubble will shatter. And the Time Lords of Gallifrey will ascend through clear skies until nothing but us remains!”

The Council cheers for him solemnly. Hundreds of feet below them, a new Dalek extermination has begun by the edge of the protective dome, but the screams of their own people do not faze them. Neither does the fact that those people scream in rage as much as in sorrow, pulling laser triggers at the enemy by the grace of anonymous donors, never by the benefactory of Gallifrey’s rulers and the protection they once promised to grant today and forever more. Forever can last a day in Gallifrey. A day in war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All I know about Neanderthal genes comes from a documentary I saw once on TV about interbreeding between the Neanderthals, the Sapiens, and the Denisovans that has had me super interested in anthropology since (intermittently as that is), and also the Wikipedia page for Neanderthal genes. But I have not let that stop me!
> 
> This is my last update before the new year, so I just wanted to say that I hope 2021 will be good and soft to you <3


	4. In time you rose to drown the fires

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Trigger & Content Warning:** Brief conversation that might loosely remind of suicidal intent.

_She doesn’t recognize herself in these hands. Larger, wrinklier, knobbier, they rest awkwardly on her thighs, perhaps waiting for something to do, something to distract themselves with. These legs, draped in velvety black that creases around her ankles and reminds her of magician hats, she doesn’t recognize either. Or the silent night of murmuring dripping water that surrounds this walled-in garden before her—this stone bench, these hedges, this fountain. This… strangeness that breathes in and out of her like oxygen dancing further and further away from the willowy plant that birthed its molecules out of carbon monoxide._

_She blinks at the impressive building cast in shadow that dwells across the garden, in a confusion very similar to the one she regards this body she’s currently inhabiting with, a body shaped oddly in comparison to the one she’s more used to nowadays._

_Next to her, on a stone bench, someone else sits regally, all atemporal purple attire and red lipstick on a face that she can perfectly place back on a planet at war. Awkwardly, her body moves out of its own accord to the right, and both her breath and her anger catch in her throat at the realization that she is unable to intervene both now in the unwilling motion and when her voice finally plows through, thick and low and bearing a tint of something earthly._

_“So,” her voice says, speaking thoughts that aren’t her own, to the figure by her side on the bench. “About that new name… Missy, huh?”_

_The figure smiles lopsidedly and tucks her own hands onto her lap._

_“Well, I couldn’t very well keep calling myself the Master, now, could I?, after my last couple of choices. The Mistress sounded just as stupid to me, but, oh, well, at least it shortens prettily. And it made for the perfect acronym at the hotel.”_

_“I don’t believe for a moment you couldn’t have sold your lies through literally any other name.” Her own voice sounds so soft and so warm. She struggles to understand as she tries to wiggle free, to speak her thoughts and stop the Master from opening her mouth and supplying another lie into the conversation. But, mostly, to stop herself from saying another word that feeds into this notion of kindness._

_Why would she ever be kind to the Master again, after everything the Master’s thrown at her, after all the betrayals, the deaths, the games? Why should she be? Why is she giving out kindness like it was her first instinct to? Where is her rage, her refusal to settle? Where are her doubts in this body, keeping her from so much as leveling with her enemy?_

_“It’s not a lie, Doctor,” the Master says now. “It’s who they need me to be, and it’s who I am. Only in flesh and bone, not the metal of an android.”_

_The bushes around the bench where they sit have begun to whistle out the lonely tunes of crickets. They mingle well in the night, in the silence that stretches for a minute, perhaps two, before the Doctor’s strange, foreign voice glides through it as her body lifts her head up a little to look at the Master._

_“I’m sorry I missed it,” her voice says, and the honesty, the sorrow it seeps confuses her like most days living in her new body, in her void-full mind, always do. “All of it.”_

_“Why?” the Master says, honestly surprised. “I suppose in a way I did long for your return, but I knew eventually I might see you again. I just didn’t know when. Even when I nudged you and Clara together, I could never quite catch your face, either. You might as well have been you from_ before.” _The Master laughs softly to herself._ _“I had no way to be sure whether I’d been waiting all that time for a past version of you to finally appear…”_

_All there’s always been is enmity across stars and battlefields, sometimes across distances too small to ever be covered or understood. The only ‘before’ that exists in their shared history is a barn and a few hundred years the Master herself made sure to burn well into ashes before she left._

_“You really shouldn’t have done that… Meddling with people’s lives, that’s…”_

_“Not good?” The Master smiles for a second, then sighs. “No, I imagine it’s not and yet… it’s what you and I have always done. I could_ feel _you out there, in need and so quiet about it, not wanting to disturb your friends by telling them so. You needed her, she needed you.” She sighs again. “Good…” Then, she chuckles quietly. “You know something, Doctor? All these years, I’ve wondered, I’ve been dying to ask you—ultimately, what do you think makes anyone good or otherwise?”_

_She watches from her uncontrollable body, and a shrill wave of recognition pierces her. The struggle to be good spans no life and floods them all with uncertainty. She would have never recognized this woman with gentle eyes and a demure stance that talks about good in front of her, not as the Master from her youth and waking nightmares. Except, maybe, deep in her hearts, a fire has been sparked at the image, at the question, that already had been alive within her as something less impressive and yet entirely made out of warm ashes._

_“Your best, Missy,” her voice says slowly. “Your best will make you good. Try it, do it. But, deep down, right here, right now, you already are. A little bit, enough. And…” Her body breathes in, allowing itself a pause to think, and the Master smiles warmly, encouragingly at her. It doesn’t feel like a defeat, or a renounce. Not even a confession. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”_

_“Your old friend back?” the Master half-teases._

_It feels like… a late-at-night conversation when and where no one can see because they’re too busy sleeping or playing elsewhere. A conversation that has survived in time and space for thousands of years._

_“No.” The Doctor feels her own face get serious and freeze itself around the very emotions all seriousness hides in her. “For you to grasp balance, peace, and… the necessary silence to find yourself. They should never have taken that away from you.”_

_“They did take it away,” the Master says, taking in a deep breath as she faces the stars above. “But don’t forget: I actively kept running from any and all opportunity to relearn those again, too. Because the void and the noise were just so much easier to stomach.”_

_“So why’d you stop?”_

_The Master stares into the Doctor’s eyes, quietly, as if asking how it can even be possible for her not to know yet, after so long._

_“I’ve always envied you, your ability to choose balance without batting an eye.”_

_“And that’s where you’re wrong, where you’ve always been wrong, Missy.” She can feel the Master quivering with pleasure at the mention of her name, spoken by the right person. “The void and the noise, they_ are _simply so much easier to stomach. But after a while, they become who you are. And the last thing I ever wanted, the last thing I want_ now, _is for me to become another noise in the void.”_

* * *

The myth of noise and silence ceases to make sense when its questioned in the heart of a TARDIS. Groaning energy pushing through tubes inside walls, a sentient solitary presence guarding room after room and its own very conscience. Two opposites that become one, with time, with the right pilot feeding both noise and silence into the air. Has no one ever loved this TARDIS, she wonders, that she doesn’t hum in place of murmuring words to fill the silences of her pilot, of her guest?

The Doctor groans herself back into consciousness. The TARDIS groans back, gladly, almost in a wailing creak of dimensions merging together. She opens her eyes to find the circular console towering over most of her body, and vaguely recalls coming to sit underneath it, eyes on the door, until she’d closed them. Now, when she sits up, the jacket that was covering her slides down onto the floor. She catches it quickly, before realizing that her own is still under her, and sees how dizzyingly purple it is.

The Master must have taken it off and covered her with it… But in what world? To play what game now? Sure, he’s leading with something that sounds enough like the truth, but what is he not saying? What, exactly, has changed since they talked? What will he get out of all of this? Not her. Not their home planet. Revenge? Another betrayal so he can laugh in her face and call her names? What does he get out of playing with her mind by bringing his own jacket to cover her in her sleep?

Unless… unless he doesn’t get anything. Unless he’s truly changed.

The dream bounces back into the chambers of her mind with the force of unstoppable natural disasters. The Master and goodness have never once mixed before in her long history trying to so much as dye a second of his life with it. But he has been a Victorian nanny in red lipstick. The Doctor remembers her on Gallifrey. _Choose well,_ he had said to her before the Doctor shot him. At the time, she’d thought it another ploy that would have allowed the Master to keep winning over her even when trapped and dead and gone. Nothing in that encounter that day made sense, so she’d chosen to overlook it as the Master’s way to play the longest game.

She _remembers_ , even if the memory is a blur, incoherent and tangled up in the void inside her hearts, inside her mind. In her head, the Master had attacked her inside the Matrix Chamber, threatened the Council, the engineers… Then why had the Doctor woken up in the Master’s arms? Arms that didn’t mean to trap her, that were only just… holding her…

She _remembers_ that she’d pointed a gun at him, the proverbial gun, and she remembers not understanding the Master’s words. _Nothing’s ever done without choice, Doctor,_ he’d said. _You taught me that. So choose well._ She’d pulled the trigger anyway. And now she wonders… she wonders, she wonders, she wonders. Taught him, when?

_When?_

In this dream that’s not a dream? Doesn’t that mean that… the Master’s been on her side all along? Doesn’t that mean she might have gotten it all wrong in a jumble of fake memories and the knot in her stomach prompting her to always trust him last?

Her fist coils around purple fabric. In a way, it makes everything worse if it’s just a nice gesture; it adds to the jumble, another piece she can’t fathom. However, she doesn’t push or shove it away. This, at least, is quantifiable. An item that may be a piece in a game or a mere representation of how little she realizes that it’s been some time since this was about games between them at all. She crumbles it in her hands for a moment, almost picking out the scent of him in it. Then, hyperaware of the stark contrast between its cleanliness and the disastrous condition of her old tux, the whirlpool of messy, muddy rain that contaminates her every thought, the Doctor stands up and grabs the purple jacket, pressing it against her stomach so it’ll be easier to carry. She needs a shower and a washing machine far more than she needs to keep sinking deep onto the mud of her own mind.

The Doctor leaves, and finds that it is terribly hard to get hold of anything usable anywhere.

Even though the structure of the corridors is similar to the one she’s used to, every room she crosses on her way is empty. If the console room was any indication of the state of the rest of the place, she should have guessed it. And she should turn back now, go to her own ship and clean up there. But that entails… trusting that wherever he is, whatever he’s doing, he won’t notice her absence enough to pull anything. And she doesn’t know if she’s ready for that yet.

She groans softly to herself. What choice does she have, anyway? It’s not like she could ever find him in an entire dimension… She’d probably find a shower first.

Then something strange buzzes inside her mind, like a signal calling to her, that makes her rethink that. Almost as if his scent had wormed its way into a level deeper than her conscious memory recollection. A trail she can… follow. A pulse of two hearts that aren’t her own, that somehow drum onto her, and set the rhythm for how many steps to take until she finds a specific door behind which the pulse resonates differently.

Her hand catches on the surface of it, on the handle. She pushes after a while and walks in to worn yellow wallpaper and a few pieces of patio furniture, almost piled lonelily inside it. A couch covered by a sheet sits by a wall, and on it… the Master, legs hanging over the arms of the couch, his arms awkwardly trying to fit in the small space he’s allowed to occupy on it. His right hand dangles so close to the floor, his fingertips practically brush against it. The Doctor doesn’t know how to enter that room.

After a while, she comes in anyway, if only to check what she came here for. She stands by him, arms crossed, and refuses to watch him sleep. But his breathing is regular like the tempo of a tick-tocking clock, and there is no way he’s lying now, too. When she does look at his face, at his long eyelashes and his calm expression, she sighs for a few seconds. There is a worry, permanent in his sleep, as if he couldn’t quite rest despite being deeply asleep, and past some time, she simply decides he’ll sleep long enough for her to shower and come back without ever noticing.

Before she can change her mind, she hangs his purple jacket on the couch’s arm, by his feet, and rushes out of there, past the desertic emptiness, into her own TARDIS, where the showers once belonged to the humans she’d picked up on her way and the place she is heading to could not be any different to streams of water falling off walls.

The tap of her shoes echoes in the giant circular room as if nothing else had come to be heard in it in very, very long, and she’s quite right to think so. The TARDIS’s baths have been well hidden from anyone except her for years. She built the interconnected pools herself—circles within circles, circles and circles—, dug into the fabric of the room, when the nostalgia of a place she couldn’t call home anymore grew unbearable. On the ceilings, a color between soft orange and deep beige, she engraved the history of her planet in the language she’s almost forgotten by spending so much time in the translation field of a TARDIS. It’s the painted scenery that now catches her eye, as she kicks off her shoes by the entrance. She’d entirely expelled that from her mind, as well, the image of all that history, perfectly conveyed in wordless motionless paintings her hand vaguely recalls having once traced while holding back tears. The ceilings back in the Citadel were never conceived to be replicated in such a manner.

Momentarily breathless, she looks up and around her, at the archways connecting columns, at the curved elegant shapes of the olden days that she brought here to remind her of the times before all her childhood memories were so transparently unveiled as… mementos of a war-like and rigid regime.

The Doctor bares herself to the air in the room, and the water calls to her, a few inches away. Deep, golden water like the color of Gallifrey that rust and blood ended up turning into red. She steps into it carefully, expecting it to be as neutrally cold as the rest of the room, but the warmth, the indifferent stupor of it shocks her once she wades away from the edge. She lowers herself until her head is fully submerged and lets the distorted sound of silence from below lull her thoughts into a state of quietude that Gallifrey itself tore open from her chest, once.

There is no sea on Gallifrey. Children grow up with the notion that water is vaporous, it comes from the skies and it may filter down to the ground for life, if the weather fails to provide, if the wills of the Time Lords command it. Rivers and lakes run until they run dry and when that comes to be, thirst and prayer are a Gallifreyan’s last routine. Only those that endure and survive the Academy ever get to hear about the _ocean_.

The Doctor remembers with astonishing accuracy, now that her entire body is covered in stolen salt water, the day she and the Master commandeered an in-repair TARDIS from one of the old workshops by the port, and flew it so far away from their constellation, their galaxy, that it took their superiors too much time to trace them there. Enough time for the two of them to locate, in their turn, a single blue planet in the middle of a dying solar system. Nothing she has seen after will ever encapsulate _ocean_ for her as well as that planet first did. She remembers they landed on a beach, its sands volcanic-rock black, and that she stood barefoot in them, hand-in-hand with the Master, as they giggled with the ecstatic pure joy proper of little children. Right away, they’d walked forward one step at a time, until that ocean had licked at their feet in the shape of foamy waves that dissipated into the beach as quickly as they reformed a few yards further in.

She’d loved him, then. So much. A boy not scared in the slightest to wreck his beautiful, perfect streak just so he could have a trip in the box with the one person in the entire Academy whose company would always get him in trouble later. And he’d loved her, then, more than he could ever lie to her about now, she realizes. A rebellious little teenager with two hearts that even then had burned too bright, too fast, too far, and whose dreams never led anyone in only one direction. He’d been the first to roll his eyes at her ideas during the day, yet he never failed to, in the depths of the night, follow her in as many directions as both their hearts convened about.

All of this has had to happen for her to follow _him_ instead _._ For her to so much as consider needing to. And the direction they’re going in, this time there’s only one.

“Okay, that’s—”

The sudden, unexpected sound has her turn back towards the entrance at once.

Of course. He’s found her. And judging by the blush taking hold of his face, his inability to look at anything in particular except his shoes, and his jittery voice, she’d say she didn’t expect to find her like this at all.

“It’s thick gold water,” she says to ease him.

Slowly, he dares peak above the height of his knees at her floating head in the pool. The blush goes absolutely nowhere. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or ask why he’d react like that now when he was the first to suggest skinny-dipping in the Lethe river, forever and a half ago. She supposes a lot can go down between forever and forever and a half.

“Were you looking for me?” she asks instead, forcing herself to sound firm, rough, and cold-hearted. Even if all she can recall in her head is her dream and that Scottish accent of hers being _kind,_ of all things, to a version of a monster she can’t place anywhere except on Gallifrey, dying and dead.

He doesn’t answer in words, and his eyes are expressive enough. Big, sad, and so, so lonely even in a distance he could never cover unless he was willing to get wet.

“How’d you find me?” she pushes it. “No one has ever been in here besides me.”

“Same way you found _me_.”

She swallows uncomfortably. So it’s not just her, then. It’s not just a residue of past times and awfully timed choices. It’s a residue of something else, something timeless and nameless that he can feel and follow just as much as she can. Energy and memories, connecting them even when it should be impossible for anything to.

Hesitatingly, the Doctor swims a bit closer to where he stands.

“And what do you want?” she says. Her breath rasps against her throat when she asks the question. Here, now, he could want many things, all of which scare her. All of which make her wish murder was easier than the urge that drives it forward. “I was supposed to come to you, not the other way around.”

Although… that had never been addressed. All she’d said is that she meant to get her memories back, on her own, and that she was staying to keep an eye on him because she didn’t yet trust him.

“I wanted to know if you were leaving. If you were okay,” he says, honestly. He kicks off his shoes as well, pulling up the edge of his pants, and sitting by the pool, feet in the water. “If _I_ should leave.” He sighs, looking up at the history in the ceiling that he will surely know was painted by her hand and no one else’s. He’d recognize the trace of her brush. “If there’s anything I can do to help that I’m not doing.”

“There is, actually.”

He stares at her. He hadn’t expected that.

“What did I look like, before this?” she asks.

He doesn’t have to think very far back. She sees it in his expression, the past coming alive, saddening him further. He breathes in and out a few times, before he kicks some golden water up, lets it drop back where it belongs, lets the ripples, the waves disappear into calmness, then answers.

“Tall, thin, grey hair, long knobby hands, magician clothes…” He smiles to himself. “And you always sounded like you were cross with everyone, except when you meant to be kind. Your kind never got lost in translation.”

The Master could have manifested a fake memory for her while she slept—she’d counted on that—, but he could have never grasped the kindness she’d witnessed in it with enough exactitude. Not as to understand why kindness, in that context, confuses her. It can’t be but a memory. A memory they share, as well as evidence that she’s the one that’s been lying. To herself.

She dives back into the golden water, pushes herself up on the edge by him, and grabs her clothes just as he turns around, uncomfortable in her nudity as she’s never seen him be. After his initial shock, she can hear him following her, asking her senseless questions, but she doesn’t care. There will never be a place for her own to be answered.

* * *

She doesn’t recognize herself in these clothes, stolen from the Master’s almost empty wardrobe. A tight white t-shirt underneath a looser short-sleeved one, the blue of it almost matching these absurdly ample pants that only stay on because someone’s had the good grace of equipping a pair of yellow suspenders, too. The image of it all, which she hasn’t stopped to seek or see anywhere, reminds her of times when looking silly was as much fun as it was her armor.

Her hair drips gold onto them now, and she lifts a leg, letting all that blue fabric tense, pull up, showing her just how little it can reach down to her foot. So much of her is bare in white, yellow, and blue.

At least down here it’s hard to notice.

The entire wiring of the console room hangs down all around her in the dark. In her own ship, she has poles and strings and a bit of a swing, for when repair season is upon her, but the Master’s never been very keen on any of that if he could pay or bribe someone else into doing it for him, and discarded tubes and cables have been collecting dust on the floor paneling, just as the actual wires coming down from the ceiling threaten her with tiny little blue sparks.

The slammed door and his footsteps on the console room make it worse, and she makes herself small, smaller, then the smallest she is capable of. The hues from the console room reach all the way here, illuminating patches of the floor she hadn’t realized weren’t empty.

“Doctor?” comes his voice from above, too close to the metal stairs.

She stays absolutely still, refusing to draw breath until he’s gone. How can she look him in the eye and know anything about him at all? How can she stand in the same room as him and _know_ what to feel, how to act? Instinct tells her one thing, her memories another, and every step she takes towards finding out more contradicts everything she thought she understood.

It’s no use hiding from him. They could find each other in hurricanes, with the sky crumbling down around them, the universe collapsing in on itself, and even with all the species racing each other to impossible survival chances, in that chaos, they would still know in their hearts where the other was. But she still wants to hide.

“Doctor…” he says again.

This time, she knows just how slowly he’s trying to come down the stairs, how gently he’s treading so he won’t spook her, as if she were a cat or a horse he needed to be careful around.

He doesn’t get she’s the one being careful with him, all because she _hesitates._ It would be so easy to confront him, like she wants to, and end it that way. So easy to follow what she was told, and end it there. But that’s not who she is, it has never been, and it’s worth listening to, the voice of defiance and justice, even if it’s small and discontinued within her. Within _him._

Eventually, he comes into the light, half a floor below its very source. He stands by the stairs and looks at her, at the frail glowing beams that filter through the ceiling and that bathe her face just right, making her wet hair shine with the colors of the rainbow that the gold helps resurface. And then… he doesn’t speak, he just… comes sit with her. To share her silence.

“You’re really not going to leave me alone, are you?” she asks, almost amused, after some time.

“I’m afraid not,” he says softly. “D’you want me to?”

“I imposed myself on you first.”

“Not working very well, is it?”

She laughs quietly.

“What are those?” She points at the floor, at the few items the light from the console room has illuminated as well as her own face.

“Those are…” He slides to the floor to pick one up and hand it to her as he sits back down. “Cat toys.”

“You have a cat?” she replies, utterly taken aback. The Master always works alone, as does he live the rest of his life.

She twists the toy in her hand, trying to get a good look at it from every angle. The feel of it is familiar to her somehow, even the weight of it, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. There’s nothing _to_ do, because there’s no cat.

“Arthur,” he says to her. Their eyes meet momentarily. “Technically not a cat. A small camouflaging species from I forgot where. You said they avoided water because it made them too much of a target, but they still depended on it?”

Somehow, it rings a bell, distant and fuzzy. Her fingers close around the cat toy.

“I… said? So it’s our cat. Either that or I was there, when you made the discovery.”

She fails to imagine the order in which all of that had to have happened. Before or after her dream? In what conditions? Were they friends again? Had they been friends for a while already? Why would they have a cat together? Did they have a life together as well?

“I suppose it is our cat. But I love him more.” He chuckles once, at a joke only he can get. “Definitely more than you.”

A pang of both recognition and doubts hit her at once, from different corners of her. She thinks she can… sort of see it, in her mind, not a void anymore, the image of an orange cat and purple, together, and her in the background, softly teasing about love, about… _more._ But it tugs at her, what has never stopped tugging at her, ever since he left her side for the first time to never return… until now.

“When did you learn how to love?” she mutters, mostly to herself, mostly to argue back.

She’d been the first he’d loved even though he had no reason to, even though he shouldn’t. After her, it’d been so easy to think that he’d lost the ability to, that he’d chosen never to again, because he’d found something better to fill all his voids than useless, silly love.

The Master sighs now and stands to his feet. When he leaves her, she almost doesn’t regret having said what she has, what has driven him away. Almost. Once, she made a promise, and she’s forgotten that promise often enough lately. _Never be cruel._ Not even to those who might deserve it.

He returns with a guitar in his hands. A guitar that he leaves by her feet, as he sits down again, hoping she will somehow understand that in it lies the answer to her question.

“Memorabilia isn’t going to magically fix this,” she says, one eyebrow raised at him.

“Even if it doesn’t,” he says gently, “I always meant for you to have this. And I do think it might. Maybe not entirely, but enough that you get what you want.”

“I don’t like musical instruments. They’re loud, and they’re unpredictable, and no one can really master them, not even in many lifetimes.”

“You don’t, now? That’s saying something!” His chuckles echo in the underground belly of the console room like the tiniest of fireworks in the open sky. “Although, if we’re judging by how many times you did try to take up—what was it? Some sort of flute? Back at home?”

She rolls her eyes in his direction.

“Provincial bagpipes,” she corrects. “And there were thirty different types.”

“And you tried them all. Not a very good instrument to start yourself with.”

Done with some fair glaring in his direction, she does haul the guitar onto her lap, positioning it right against her even though she has no memories to guide her. Her fingers strum, almost automatically, a melody he knows well by now that tugs at his heartstrings like nothing else can. Except, maybe—

“Does this sound like something to you or am I just making sounds…?”

The Master clears his throat, closed up with the recollections of the song, until he’s free to breathe and tell her what she’s expecting of him.

“Um… _This Old Guitar,_ I think it’s called.”

“Appropriate…” she mutters as she continues, trying to get the whole song out on the first try. Every note her fingers reach and give out into the small space between them is a heartbeat he chooses not to feel inside his chest, a second of another life he struggles not to pay attention to too closely. And even then…

She really has no idea how appropriate it is, indeed. The first time she played it for him, the Doctor was grieving Clara’s loss. The second time, the Master played it to himself after the Doctor had been kidnapped, and now… the Doctor’s own mind is reaching out, trying to find itself in the corners of it, and succeeding far better than he’d expected.

Abruptly, then, the music just stops. Too much muscle memory crowds the spaces between thoughts where there should be something else, something conscious and alert that she gets to enjoy, not just… a vague trail on vaguer grounds. She couldn’t even tell him, right here, right now, if she ever liked the song, or if it has lyrics, or who sung it. All she knows is that, at some point, her fingers memorized it well. Very, very well.

The guitar meets the cold metal floor once more, and the Doctor resumes the silence that preceded the Master’s arrival. Every five minutes, a sigh erupts from the depths of her onto the dark, intermittently lit room. She crosses her legs at one point, in a very poor attempt to stop herself from jiggling them, from letting them jitter her away.

“You really don’t have to do this whole thing,” the Master mumbles after a long while.

“What thing?”

“The moping under here like someone just died. I think you _are_ remembering. Not all at once. Imagine what that might look like with the size of your mind…” Softly, he allows himself a small appreciative laugh. “But you do know and recognize things you shouldn’t, or wouldn’t, unless you _were._ ”

The Doctor snorts loudly.

“So, what? Is that supposed to make me feel better? _Fantastic, I’m not a great big blank to be posteriorly filled by my continuous empty existence_ ,” she says. “Thanks. Except, to this moment, that’s exactly what I am.”

He forces himself to take a deep calming breath.

“It will come to you, and if it doesn’t, I can help so that it does. Soon, so that you can rest easy. But it’s already coming to you, and I’ve got reasons to believe the rest will, too. If you let it.”

“And what, exactly, is your role in that, then? If I can remember on my own, why are you still here? What’d you expect to gain from this?”

Despite her angry tone, he looks at her in the knowledge that it will take far more than a guitar and a few sentences out of context, an enormity more than just his word, for her to truly and whole-heartedly trust him.

“You keep looking at me like I’m something you want to squash or… something you’re not quite sure deserves to go on living in your presence—fine by me, I understand why. But I _can_ help,” he says, almost mutters. As gently as he can, as softly. With all the love he has been reigning in since the day he met her, since the day he understood and wished he hadn’t. “I was there for most of it, Doctor. I know the names of those tombs in your graveyard, who they belong, belonged, or will belong to. I know the name of that song, I know who you played it for and in front of. And I know the context for what you speak when you dream.”

She breathes out furiously and yet softly at the same time. He’s not supposed to know about the dreams.

“You… are not… getting in my head,” she hisses through her teeth.

“But I already _am_ ,” he says, his voice full of old longing. _“_ In so much of it.”

She looks at him with pools of tears beginning to cloud her eyesight, already showing right there, in the surface. Her rage once more overcomes everything else, and she swallows her own emotions in order to voice them.

“If I let you in, that’s it for me. I lose all credibility, therefore so do you. Because if I one-hundred percent cease to have the ability to know who to believe, what to believe, you’re _done._ ” She pauses. _“_ Can you understand that? Do you understand it?”

Their eyes meet in the tension words can’t properly let crumble, and he ignores the fact that he’ll be deemed either stupid or brave for doing what just crossed his mind, then he does it either way, and just scoots closer to her. As close as they used to sit, when they were kids, afraid of everything but not each other. Their hands, his right, her left, are open on the small space where they’re sitting. As close as they used to be, in another life, when she only cried in the depths of night when no one could see, and pretended, the rest of the time, that her tears were a fiction.

“What do you suggest, then?” he says. “You want your memories back. Let’s get them back. How, if I can’t return them to you?”

“I don’t know…” she mutters. Her head hangs low, and her hair covers her face. She hides behind it, just as she does behind her response.

He pushes past it.

“It’s a matter of time. Do you have it? Do you count on having more of it than you currently possess?”

She lifts up her head at him again, and her hair scatters around her raging eyes, framing them well, even in a non-permanent, non-stable darkness.

“Every second I spend here, asking myself that question, is a second I’m away from a war I pledged to keep my eye on.”

“So that’s a no,” he jokes.

She nudges at him.

“Of course it’s a no!”

They keep silent for a while.

“Then, the only thing I can think of… is something I’m not sure you’d like either,” the Master says.

“What?” She scoffs out of her nose. “Because, let me assure you, it can’t be much worse than you breathing shared memories back into my head…”

He swallows audibly.

“I’ve got remnants of matrix technology. Here, I mean. Initially designed to host post-mortem human minds. Then, sort of broken down into pieces for… other projects.” He sounds terribly shaky for someone putting forward a plan, as if he was trying somehow to keep details of it in the dark. “But I think I could put it together to fit your case.”

“To suck out my memories?” she says with every little bit of intent in her to mock him.

The Master rolls his eyes to himself at her silly wording, definitely uttered on purpose to unease him.

“Do you have a better idea?” he says. “Because I’m all ears and, after all, it is your mind it’d be sucking out of.”

Truth be told, this is his last card to play. Either let her come to her old lives slowly, in her own time, gently connect their minds together so he can feed back to her whatever shared memories they did live out together, or use any technology on board to force her own mind to relive them on its own.

“Do you honestly think it’ll help?” she asks, all hostility and mockery suddenly devoid from her voice. Again, she’s hunched forward, in an attempt to conceal her expression and body language from him, more than the lack of light ever could.

“Yes,” he says softly. “It’ll be quick, probably not painless, but… if they used the Matrix in the Citadel to do this to you, in fact there’d be no better way to undo it.”

Hesitantly, the Master brings his right hand to the small in her back, and wonders if it’s brought her more comfort than confusion. She then sits up again, next to him, and her eyes, ever changing in the light, in the emotions torturing her from within, he supposes are a straight window to the chaos that those Time Lords decided to inject straight into her. Anything else is only either comfort or fire.

She does never ask him to move that hand away.

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Well, in that case… I guess you’re just going to have to rejoin that war under your own understanding of what your truth is and, regardless of everything else, do what the Doctor would.” Her hearts skip a beat before he even says it—because she knows he will say it. “Your best.”

* * *

He’s rolled up his sleeves to better throw himself at a machine long forgotten, wrench in one hand, an overcomplicated hammer in the other, and the Doctor lets him pull off the deadly cobwebs of quietude that cover his matrix. In all she’s missed, perhaps there was a point in which he did learn the dos and don’ts of mechanics and how to make a nail flawlessly pierce instead of scratch its way into any surface it’s being hammered on. The console room, corridors away, may as well simply be his one lazy allowance.

Right hand well delved into the heart of an open metal panel, the Master flinches, almost hisses in pain, and his body trembles slightly when he shakes his entire lower arm out, grabbing his shoulder with his left hand.

“Shit…” he curses under his breath.

Because in a way she’s to blame for his pain, she tries not to sound very condescending when she says:

“You really should get that wound checked.”

“It’s a scar at this point.” The Master groans his way back onto his feet, as if his own physical form burdened him, while he carries a small helmet-looking piece in his good arm, connected to the main matrix via outer wiring. “Not a… wound. And I’m flattered, by the way, that you’d care.”

She ignores that last bit.

He lifts the helmet up enough to fit it onto her head, but she intercepts it out of his hands.

“I’ll have a look at it first, if you don’t mind…” she says, self-assured.

Her head cocks slightly to the side, instead of directly leveling the helmet up to her eyes. She’s recovered her normal curiosity, that tiny little frown between her eyebrows that’s the perfect tell-tale she’s about to lose a few seconds of her time to a discovery.

The circuitry belongs exactly to the patterns of what he said he’s doing, but her fingers go over them a few times, unable to quite convince herself of it, like deep down she still expected a trap to come out of all of this.

The Master crosses his arms.

“You know, I was just going to put it on you,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “It’s hard to attach it properly without any outside help.”

“Yeah, I can do it on my own.” She twirls away from him, helmet still in her possession, most definitely settling it onto her head, a little bit crookedly so. “But thanks.”

Nothing in the many lives he’s led drips such warmth and honey-sweet weight into his chest when he catches her off-guard, almost smiling at him with the young insolence of their past times together. It freezes him for a solitary breath, then the Master takes a grand step in her direction, reaching out for the helmet and its wiring in such a slapdash manner he wouldn’t be surprised if she saw through his intentions. But he couldn’t care, if she did.

“Will it kill you to let me adjust it and press the right buttons?”

“I don’t know.” She faces him, her entire face a prefect reflection of that old defiance that never dies in her. Her arms cross just below her chest, and she sways a bit where she’s standing, waiting for him to react. “Will it?”

“Depends on how much pain you can take at once, _Doctor_ ,” he taunts, he teases, proud of never really delving deep into that voice within that knows full well how to play this game dangerously. The joy of playing like the little children they once were eclipses all his desires of danger.

The Doctor rises on her tiptoes to be taller than him and, even with her arms crossed, out of her normal balance, she contorts her face into a smirk prouder than he could ever be of himself.

“A fair lot,” she claims.

And the Master softens before her, letting her win. He’s never told her this before, he doesn’t think. But she always wins with him. Sometimes, out of her own wit and panic, mixed together into a pot of absolute brilliance that could—and does occasionally—overpower whole civilizations. Other times, in the heart of the game, it was his most wanted prerogative to watch her walk away triumphant and safe, so he did, and called it a victory of his own to be able to.

_It was never about winning._

“Then no,” he replies now with a smirk. “So, now that we know nobody’s killing anybody today, _can_ I finish with this?”

“Yeah, okay, fine, _do_ go on.”

She dismisses it all with her tone, but he still smiles. He can’t help it. How can he not believe, when even in moments that should stake both his hearts with despair, the Doctor revives in ways she herself cannot possibly measure against the background of the past life? They did used to be like this as children, as friends, of course. But they grew back into this, too, as a family found in adversity and cared for out of nothing else but choice.

Quickly enough, the Master concludes his task, his touch never more than a fleeting brush on her skin. Then, he kneels once more by the matrix, and wills it into life. It revs for a moment, mimicking loud engines on Earth, and then the Doctor forces herself to take a deep breath.

The Master places his hand on her shoulder.

“Ready, then?” he asks.

Seconds separate her now from the barrier that is her void, a null-ness that has stolen so much she cannot even name… and yet she doesn’t know how to face it now. She turns around instead to look at him. He called himself an idiot in a box, just as she does, and now that’s what they are. Idiots waiting in a box for answers. Answers she sought, she wants desperately… and answers she dreads.

Who is she, if she’s not who she remembers? Who has she become, after wars she chose to end? After alliances she chose to join? And who is she now, allying herself with a changed Master just to get it all back?

“Yup,” she says, making sure she sounds absolutely firm.

_I’m the Doctor and I…_

She can never finish that thought. The matrix swallows her whole where there’s no self, no memories, no consciousness, only a stream of time, regurgitated back from within into shapes that her mind vibrates to, in accordance to what another matrix, the mother of all, once silenced from it.

* * *

Leather and black. Is that who she was, back then? Rough hands, long ears, heavy hearts. A girl’s laugh reaches her ears, too. Crystalline and homely, like she imagines the universe might laugh if it could. With them, two men, the one who tells the joke, and the one who finishes telling it as if he’d lived it first. Her fingers rest on a table somewhere. She slams a hand on it, careful of the plates, as she guffaws, and somehow the heaviness inside just… lifts away. The void has blurred it all. But their colors. Red, blue, yellow. The scents of Cardiff in the sun, the sounds of Cardiff in the night. Their faces, their names…

Somewhere else, where green reigns free, history and time have made up for names. Golden Gallifreyan epitaphs. _The Man Who Could Not Die_. Blue and never buried. _Defender of the Earth._ Yellow, always loyal, always hopeful. And red… Red’s is the one gravestone in all of that green without an epitaph. Red, the first color in a rainbow, after an existential nothingness that once felt like the last thing she would experience in her time. How could she ever have words for that?

* * *

But she does. She really does.

Red. Like roses. _Rose._

Rose and Jackie and Mickey and Jack and—

_Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!_

* * *

_Does it need saying?_ Didn’t it? That she loved that girl? Like she loves them all, only Rose was the first… after the nothingness.

* * *

Magician velvet she knows. It clings to the exploding skin she inhabits. But she wants _out._ Death ahead, life inside, and friends behind. Friends without faces, their voices loud for her to hear even in the power of a regeneration running its course. This death she dies so someone else can live. Is this who she is? The one who dies? The one who gets to rise again, after? The one who gives it all up easily because she can? An old body morphs into a new one. Younger, smaller, different. There is no pain in it that she hasn’t known a dozen times before. This is no pain she can’t stand. Death is rebirth. And life is harder than enduring it.

And yet… how can there still be harder things?

Someone has asked for her to stop. Someone has asked for her to die some other time. With someone else. Not here, not now, not for this. Someone whose voice echoes the stars, this timeless energy that regenerates like history itself. And she breathes out new lungs into a cold, empty street, aware in her hearts that it’s the love of that someone that has caught her, that has tried to save her from all of this. In a cycle of blame, it’s the arms of a woman in purple and a Victorian hat that remind her where it all started. And why.

_I’m the Doctor and I… save people._

And the woman… _Purple, she—she tries to save_ me.

* * *

Glass shards in her brown suit, against her face and her open palms. When the four knocks come, it’ll be over. She wills them closer with each heartbeat. All she’s ever really craved is an end she can’t have or even know how to want properly. Two planets collide in a gravitational dance under her feet, above her head. And a ghost from the past has come through because of it, gauntlet aimed high at her chest.

“We will initiate the Final Sanction. The end of time will come at my hand. The rupture will continue until it rips the Time Vortex apart. We will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be.”

She should be pointing her gun at him. She points it elsewhere.

Another ghost plagues her. Black and red and white. The colors of the only ghost she calls hers. He bleeds when he can, where he can, and then… then he becomes nothing but blue sparks she aches to look at.

“Get out of the way.” She shoots to end the planetary conjunction.

And the lord and president of her past aims his death ray back at her chest.

“Get out of the way…” her ghost growls. Then he takes the hit for her.

* * *

_I’m not letting you die! We’re the only ones left. You’re not abandoning me again._

* * *

_I can’t come with you. But I can let you go. And I’m not even going to ask where you’re going. Or when. Or to do what._

_You will see. Someday. But I do wish you’d ask._

* * *

Purple and black face her, a rainbow. They ooze danger and thrill and mystery, and she… she steps back on metal floors to calm her rage. Once, they were the part of the rainbow she always looked forward to the most. Now they oppose her like a perfect match of opposite twins. And she hates that their alliance shifts her light off until it fades. Maybe underneath everything, she has harbored darkness all along, too.

Out of the filthy windows of a mangled spaceship, she notices the sea.

* * *

_I’m a coward. I didn’t ask because I wasn’t ready to … accept that you’d done better than me. That you were choosing to do better than me._

_I did always think that made you a very good friend._

_‘Good’... But goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit. Without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis._

* * *

“Remember that.”

Her own voice, right now, emerges to say it with enough presence to break through the fabric of a matrix. Memory and self, together at last, to do what she’s always done.

* * *

A red scarf around her neck, a thick coat on her back, and a beanie on her head. The cold makes her forget about the lulling of the sea, about what the sea took and never returned. She’s supposed to put it back together. _They_ are. Purple and that girl that’s every color of the rainbow… and her. But she’s never really known how to put anything together. All she ever does… is improvise and hope for the best. And all she wants now is to run from it.

* * *

_I don’t know or care what you used to do before. Is this what you do now? Stick around long enough to get scared, and then throw all your tactical advantage away and take off, leaving people behind to deal with things you know they can’t alone?_

* * *

_Even when you’re fighting it harder than I’ve ever seen you fight anything, you respond when the universe calls. You respond and try to help even if you know you can’t. That’s what you do for us all. That’s who the Doctor is._

* * *

Who was right?

* * *

Was _she_ right?

* * *

Three pairs of eyes see it. The terror in a face. The only face that could never believe she’d do it, if it was this version of her doing it. But she buried all of this, it was her. This body, that body, the one before. Does it matter, the shape of the hand that presses the button which will bury it? Children, little children, run through the streets. Bones of the fallen pile up around them. And chaos follows everywhere they go. All she can hear is screams, all she has ever been able to hear whenever the rest of the world fell quiet after is the relentless echo of those screams.

Then terror speaks. Terror and time and tenacity made person.

“Look at you. The three of you. The warrior…”

Two lives in the desert. A gun that she only ditches after it has been bloodied. And a name she drags along the sand, a penitence before the sin. Even far away from cities, at the heart of wars, walls have ears. If ascension is how it ends, she will forfeit the beginning. Isn’t that the only way Time Wars ever can truly end? She steals its epicenter. All to keep them from destroying the universe… She implodes the war from within, and the planet dies in its own fire, and that’s her punishment, that she… doesn’t. This guilt, she must carry on with. All to save the universe. Isn’t that what she does? Isn’t this who she is?

“…the hero…”

So much. A hand, lost. A hand, given to all, taken from some. Hope, she’s born with hope. Bright, buoyant. Stars and black holes and cascading sights attest to it. _Forever,_ someone says. And then the biting cold of a beach up north eats it away. She stands on a precipice until she becomes the precipice, and by then… what good is a moon, a fake future, a lost year? She loses. Hope and friends and life. Even when it lands back inside her ship in full bright veiled white, she loses it all back again in the biting cold of a beach up north.

“…and you.”

Fish fingers and custard. And guilt. Unsurmountable guilt that she hides. Pain that a change of clothes, a change of attitude, cannot ever put right. They come to her, little fish in the ocean of the stars, and because they’re two, the nothingness inside her is momentarily halved as long as they stay. Then… her guilt doubles. Her death might have saved them from this. But all the rivers in the universe would have suffered, wouldn’t they, if she’d died? And isn’t this what she stands for? Keeping the universe’s little fingers far enough away from the blades of suffering? Not even the terror of impossibility, time in a timeship, tenacity by her side when she tries to run away, manage to quench the guilt. Old, old guilt in the shape of the same old question.

“And what am I?”

“Have you really forgotten?”

“Yes. Maybe, yes.”

“We’ve got enough warriors. Any old idiot can be a hero.”

Names, an endless procession of names on stone. Golden on gray on green. She would run out of space, were she to write them all down. One day, she will.

“Then what do I do?”

“What you’ve always done. Be a doctor.”

* * *

_Ultimately, what do you think makes anyone good?_

_Your best. Your best will make you good._

* * *

_‘Good’ is just trying to be good, acknowledging when you’ve fallen short, and doing your best not to next time._

* * *

_And if it doesn’t work?_

_Well, in that case… I guess you’re just going to have to do what the Doctor would. Your best._

* * *

—Martha and Donna and Wilfred and Amy and Rory and River and Clara and Bill and—

* * *

It pours, it pours. It never stops pouring her back into herself.

* * *

The Master yanks the helmet off her. It hits a wall with a clank. He rushes to hold her down.

“Doctor?”

She rubs at the back of her neck, and when she lifts her head back up again, finds that he’s staring at her with ancient worry. She groans for an answer.

“I thought…” he says. “I thought something had gone terribly wrong. Your face, it was—”

He never does get to tell her. About the tension he had been able to discern, so large he had thought at some point she was about to start bleeding out of her nose. Or worse.

Her own eyes pierce his without any boundary erected between them this time. All the accumulated anger she has been repressing, rechanneling into parts of her that can’t feel it, manifests now in that one simple gesture, so much so that he shivers before it. When it drops away into grief, neither know how to act around it. And eyes can only say so much.

All she’s seen, all she _knows_ is hers to remember and yet still can’t think of as her own… She can’t begin to understand it. She doesn’t dare to try.

“I saw home,” she only murmurs, her voice rough and shivering. “I… I think I… remember.”

“What do you remember?” the Master whispers.

“The Moment,” she mutters now, not in reverence, not in fear. In horror of the past that in her head can’t be undone. “I used the Moment on home.”

His hand hovers between them, because he never dares reach up for her hands, for her face, to soothe her with his touch as well as his words.

“Hey. Hey, look at me.” Slowly, she does. “You did. And Gallifrey as we knew it ended, yes. But then you _came back._ With twelve other Doctors from all corners of space and time.” For the briefest of times, she seems to find peace in that. “Two Gallifreys. On two different spots in the universe. One burned, one unburned.”

“Where the war goes on. On and on and on it goes,” the Doctor mutters to herself. Peace is short-lived. At her age, at the age she believes she is, peace is only truce, and death awaits its instability. “It can never end unless I stop it again…”

The Master chooses to pretend that she doesn’t mean a second Moment. Even if she did, the only one in existence burned when she activated it. Still, she never pursues the idea, her thoughts swing away, into memories she once shared with him and that now she must have regained.

“That face… that face I saw. I… I haven’t been that face yet.”

She describes the traveler that went on calling himself everything but the Doctor and his soul sinks. The last Doctor who lived in any remnant of happiness was the Doctor who regenerated into a lost soldier that would soon become a nameless warrior in time and with wars.

“Doctor… You’ve been conditioned to think it’s the beginning of something that has been going on for… too long. You’ve had _seven_ lives since. You’ve lived for thousands of years, I—”

How much can fit in seven lives? How many empty graves?

“I’m so sorry…” he finishes, his voice barely audible. “But… it’s the last days of the Time War for everyone else on Gallifrey, for me.”

Empty. Her gaze is empty when she rouses from the well of her thoughts to look into his eyes.

“I saved a planet from myself,” she says, “and condemned it to the same old war I thought I was saving it from the first time.”

She laughs without any humor. The irony kills her, deep, deep down. Nothing has never hurt as richly as irony, in moments like this, when she needs everything but.

“Because the guilt was too much,” he says seriously now. “So you set up an unbreakable bubble to trap the war there, to sabotage the Council’s ascension and force them to handle the Daleks before dabbling in internal schemes.”

“Then it wasn’t unbreakable to start with. I called it mercy when it wasn’t.” she roars. “And I made a mistake. Because they came for...” She breathes in, eyes closed, brow furrowed. “That girl…”

The girl who did what they all do at some point, and begged to die in the Doctor’s place, because she too didn’t realize how important she was. Now, it takes the Doctor a second just to remember the way her lips would move, her arms would cross, and a moment longer to have it all form a name engraved onto a tomb.

“Clara,” she speaks it quietly. Then, her anger returns, amplifying itself alongside her voice. “It was my fault they came and took her when they couldn’t take _me_.”

“No,” he says. Her tone is contagious, and it embeds into his own words further than he intended to let it. “No, never. It was _my_ fault. When they took Clara, I… Those months we spent, I didn’t know upon waking if—they took a part of you with them, too, Doctor. And all that time, you worried. That they’d do it again, that they’d risk open war outside their borders, that they’d hurt innocents, just to get you back in the Time War. And I didn’t want to listen. I thought… if we could move on, it’d be like it’d never happened. Like… she was safe at home and you had never suffered her loss. She’d just be another companion who’d left.” He nods, sniffling softly. He bites down on his lower lip so he can go on. “Even when we made friends with Bill, you insisted. It wasn’t safe, and you knew it, and you fought to protect her because you’d already lost Clara to it, and you’d promised to me, no more. No more… And I—I dissuaded you against taking it seriously. I stood by your side, while calling myself your _friend,_ and I…”

He breaks. Finally, with his last words, he breaks. Fully, completely, in front of her.

“And I urged you to let go, to—to believe we were safe. If we were all together, why wouldn’t we be?” Long trails of tears dampen his thick eyelashes, course down his cheeks, and weigh on the Doctor’s chest like her own mistakes. “So it’s my fault. It’s always been my fault.” He sniffles in loudly. “If it weren’t for me, you’d _remember_ , and none of this would’ve happened.”

But she’s not listening. She can’t. All she feels is her chest, her hearts, and the ache for release. A breath she can’t quite _breathe._ Because all of this is _hers_ and yet it feels like someone else’s. A history that makes no sense, that despite of its incoherence continues to echo hard with her every heartbeat. A history that reflects itself back at her in the eyes of he who she always called his enemy.

An enemy who has repented, even now, at the end of all things when it should be most impossible for anything but destruction and oblivion to rage free.

Past those hands of his that never quite decide to reach for her, the Doctor dashes out of the room without making a noise. He’s already loud enough for the two of them. And he will always be. Louder than the ghosts of a war she has been in thrice. She pushes those ghosts further inside her. They have already grown as large as they can be allowed to. This ghost, _her_ ghost, she will never understand, not even with a million trips in a matrix of his own devising.

Out in the desert, the thunder peaking beneath mountain tops and dunes mirrors the storm in her. She runs to it with the desperation of a person clinging to a last thread of certainty in an ocean of voids. Thunder, dark clouds eclipsing the daylight… When the rain is discharged on this dead planet, will it feel anything like the turmoil she’s fleeing from? Can she outrun what hides inside her, what pushes past the constraints of flesh, begging for liberation?

A hill in the distance. Bare feet climb towards it, tearing at the sand and dirt that slides off every time she moves up. Surrounded by the eye of the storm, she has no way to know how hard she’s gasping… or if her breath was just the thunder, the flash of lightning hidden from view. One single thought crowns her mind as she reaches the top. That this is no fight or flight response, this is just the Doctor’s way. Run, because she’s never known how to stay and face whatever’s waiting for her in the place she’s left behind. Running’s faster, running’s easier, running’s… forgetting for dummies.

_“And where do you think you’re going?”_

_She’d caught him packing in the dead of the night. Curious, she’d decided to feign sleep until he’d left and then follow him in the silhouettes of the night. It was just going to be one of those funny greetings with a twirl that she used to pull right before catching him doing extra homework or training his sprint. This time, she’d walked in his shadow for miles into the moonless desert, far where no towns, no dwellings could be found._

_“What?! Have you—you’ve been following me!”_

_“Yeah, it’s not very hard to do,” she’d said. “You’re loud.” Coming to stand by his side, she put her hands in her pockets and tried again: “So, where_ are _you going?”_

_He’d raised his hands up at her. “Where’d you think? I’m done.”_

_“Done with what?”_

_“You! This!” He paused. “I don’t know!”_

_“Oooooooh, so you’re running away,” she’d finally understood. And all she’d done about it was grab one of his bags and haul it onto her own shoulder. “Can I come?”_

_He’d looked at her like she had just said something in a language of her own invention._

_“And leave your little circus of ‘look, I’m so perfect one day I’ll get a teaching position, reformulate a few dozen syllabi, and singlehandedly build the second Citadel, even though both teachers and students and, frankly, everyone else shudders to hear me walk by at this point’? Please.”_

_He turned his back on her, intent on moving forward on the dunes. She followed with a shrug and a noncommittal noise until they were side by side once more._

_“I’m not that great,” she stated. “And you’re not terrible.”_

_“That’s not the point,” he muttered. “You don’t even get what the_ point _is.”_

_“I do. And I’m telling you, can I come with you?” she’d said it with a giant smile on her face, to hammer the point home even more. He hadn’t gotten it at first. He’d just… blinked at her—gaped, more like—, his mouth open in the cool desertic night. “Even I’d use up everything to mess with on my own here, but with you? I don’t think I ever could run out.”_

_“Of what?” he’d asked, reluctantly enough._

_“Of_ anything _.”_

_And there it was again, the smile. He’d often said he hated it, but in the end she pulled it because she knew it worked. And this time, more than any other time, she needed it to._

_“Here… or anywhere else,” she added._

_He waited a long time to, but eventually groaned with his characteristic passivity that hid so much more._

_“Yeah, we’re turning back. I could not put up with just you for the rest of time,” he growled. “Let at least a few dozen other people handle you…”_

_He complained the rest of the way into the main city, until the suns dawned on their heads. She never once stopped smiling at him, despite his cursing and his muttering. She couldn’t have let Gallifrey miss out on the only mind that was fit for the grandeur it promised them all._

The wind picks up, lifting the particles of sand and soil and dirt that have been discarded from the earth. The storm is here. And hers is worse than ever. Even atop the hill, breathless, taking dust into her mouth, she cannot tell which is louder. The noise inside her, or the thunder coming from every direction, all the way to her.

Suddenly, she sees him, a dot emerging from another dot, yards and yards away.

“Doctor!” he screams, raw, onto the dry desert. Over and over again, he roars it out. Darkness falls, the clouds whirl around the known reality, and yet he goes on. She shudders to think what he’ll do, what he’s capable of doing, if he’ll fight a storm to get to her. Then he spots her, a dot risen up on an orange hill, and she remembers… this is not the first storm he’s ever fought.

All those years, the Master had striven his hardest to be the best at everything the Academy could try him at, and yet the Doctor entered a room, disheveled, sleepless, and with the slightest, drunkest of efforts, she managed to excel at whatever he’d spent months on. It never mattered what her piss-poor reputation was, she’d _glowed_ out of the charts, she’d been brilliant. Never anyone’s favorite, still the one luck’s favored the most, and his favorite friend, envy be damned.

With time, how could he not grow to challenge her all the time, for no reason at all, into becoming a better version of themselves and see who reached perfection first? So many games and dares were thrown into the air between them that they knew for a fact the other would catch, because they were just alike. She’d already been a rebel, before his eight-year-old self had asked her to admit to her fear and face it. But now he’d taught her to compete for public defiance. And he might have been a noble with a desire to enlarge his reputation, but with the Doctor in his life, dancing in the dark, running away to the forbidden shores of lakes, and hijacking machines out of discarded restricted tools became his most prized power, his new skill to develop and improve until mastered. They were too young, too foolish, too hopeful to ever realize what that would ripen into, what resentment and love and friction would indelibly burn between them.

“Doctor!” His voice finds her, he’s so much closer now. “Doctor!!!”

He’s cut off by a bolt of lightning, and the thunder, ricocheting off the geography of the desert, is a prelude for the first drops of rain that drench his short dark hair, promptly spreading over his shoulders. His feet are quick on the lumpy mud, hands clawing at the ground when he trips and falls. Over and over again, he takes fists full of wet sand and screams her name until his throat vibrates pain out as well as sound. Because she’s right there, a dark figure in the storming dark, and he could reach her, he could always have reached her, if he’d known how, if he’d played well, if he’d been brave and not lost her, year after year, war after war. If he hadn’t lost her the first time, then lost her as a consequence to it the many times after. If he hadn’t believed he’d never lose her a last time, fooled into believing they were both finally mightier than the Time Lords who’d bred them for that very same deceitful mightiness.

It’s pouring, wind making spirals of everything in the air, when he lets go. Knees on the slope, he scrapes at the edge of the hill, fingernails muddy and caked with the dirt he cannot stand on, and he sobs it out one last time:

“Doctor…”

Her own hand coils around his, just as slippery, and pulls him back up, yanks him up to her side. He stands, his back to the precipice, and contemplates her, her blue shirt and pants soaked in old rainwater just as his own clothes are, for the briefest second.

Barefooted, she takes a step closer to him.

“If I push you off right now, you’ll…” Her voice is low, unsure, as she notices his heels are barely missing the abyss, the way she’s trapped him against it.

“I’ll be dead,” he confirms. “And I won’t even bother to regenerate again. Not this time. So do it. Do it, I deserve it. You’re like this because of me, you’re like this because I chose _wrong_. I let you go, and I kept letting you go, and now what? You run away? I chase you? Again and again and again and—” He shakes his head erratically. “Not back to the beginning, Doctor. _Any_ where but the beginning.”

“I thought I hated you, I thought I could. But… I know who you are now.” High-pitched, wavery, no longer confused, just broken, she speaks. “I know who you are to me, but I don’t know _me._ I don’t know who the fuck I am!”

She laughs loudly, terribly. She’s the gusts of cold wind that would annihilate sand and desert, both, if sheer force was the variable that achieved it.

“It doesn’t even matter anymore!” he says, echoing her laughter, nervous and strange in his own voice.

“Push _me_ off,” she says, dead serious.

A second lasts far longer when such a thing is uttered. A second is all he needs to solemnly swear to himself this is not about his grief.

“I’m not doing that.”

She yanks him out of the way to try and stand on the edge. He fights her.

“Push _me_ off the hill.”

“I’m not _doing that_!”

“I remember,” she sobs out. “I remember the children. I killed them once, and I’m killing them again, _now,_ in this stupid war.”

“I’ve killed more. I’ve killed thousands, millions of planets more than you, and I killed because I _liked_ to,” he reminds her, louder than her. He has to be or she won’t hear him. “You saved the universe, it’s what you do. We’re standing on Gallifrey’s legacy. Your legacy.”

“And how can I ever be _the Doctor_ after that? After this? How can I be _any_ thing at all? I don’t even _know—_ It’s a broken legacy. Gallifrey’s, mine, it’s all broken. It always was.”

“So fix it.”

“No.”

“Fix it. Kasterborous the mighty, _fix it._ ”

“No…”

“Fix it!”

“You, the war, everyone left behind… How can there be a future after that? All I’ve got left is—” She groans, a sound proper of the storm. “It’s not coming back to me. It’s all fake, foreign. It’s not _mine._ All I am is that war _._ And that child. I’m that child who ran from danger and grew up into a bomb anyway.”

“You’re no bomb,” he says, quietly.

“But I am! Twice, thrice, I _am_ what’s ending lives _._ ”

“Listen to me. Doctor! Doctor.” He cups her face in his hands to steal her attention away, strokes her earring with his thumb, and the raindrops slide from the metal of it onto his fingernail, down the slant of his phalange. “I’ve known you for so long I could regenerate into _you_ if I died, and the universe would not so much as bother noticing or caring. I _know_ who you are. And that’s nothing like a bomb, or a weapon, or even a warrior. You’re the storm that blows out the fires others set to cause mayhem. You’re the hand that pulls up enemy, friend and stranger alike onto safety, the survivor that mourns them if you fail. You’re the storyteller, the only one, who will ever know what happens after the end of all tales. And if you for one second think, for so much as _one second_ , that…” Her hands tremble up, but manage to reach his elbows. She wraps her fingers around them. Now the two of them tremble together in the cold, in the chaos. “If you for one second think that I’ll ever let you believe you’re anything less, if you try to run away from that, then run. Run, Doctor. I’ll always catch you. I always have.”

The rain continues to fall on their faces, on their souls, and in the union of his fingers on her temples, thus also of their minds, a memory resurfaces that belongs to them both as their foreheads slowly come to meet like two walls of rock growing to form a unity after eons of waiting for the earth to let them.

_Anyone who had seen them at it would have thought them plenty of years younger than they were. She stood in a device of her own making, scraps of old circuits the workshops had abandoned that now surrounded her body like a winged exoskeleton with an equipped engine, and the Master shielded his eyes from the suns, a few yards below on proper flat ground._

_“You’re not really going to jump, though,” he kept saying. “Are you?”_

_He should never have told her how much he wished to fly in one of those TARDISes that the Citadel kept locked away from the younger students. At this point, he knew just how dangerous she was when told about wishes in the dead of the night. She usually turned up with half of them already realized in the morning._

_“Only one way to try this!” she shouted now._

_The canyons of Gallifrey echoed her own words back but they remained faded in the background of an engine revving when she activated her device and dug her heels on top of the hill where she’d climbed._

_“Oh, stars…” he’d muttered. “Thete!”_

_“It’s gonna work, I can feel it.”_

_She hadn’t waited. She’d just run. Like they did in the mornings sometimes, to keep supple and fast. She’d always been a fast runner, he almost didn’t catch her last stride, the one that pushed her off the edge into the air as the machine elevated her a few feet._

_In awe, he stepped back, dropping the hand that shielded his eyes, to see the path of her flight properly._

_“Theta fucking Sigma, that bloody brain on you, you absolutely ridiculous genius…”_

_He’d wanted to fly, and there she was, creating a machine out of basically nothing… A machine that did fly. Not in time, not through space, but it moved in the air like a huge metallic bird, and he could only watch, mesmerized._

_“Your turn next!” she called from above._

_That’s when smoke started to cloud her trajectory._

_“Land it!” he shouted. “Just land it.”_

_“Wait, I think I’ve got it.”_

_She fiddled with the controls on the front of her device, and realized, despite her efforts, that she was losing too much altitude._

_She didn’t think about it, and neither did he._

_When she pushed the button that freed her of the constrains of the exoskeleton, right into the hard desertic ground, his body hurried forward to intercept her fall. The device crashed into pieces next to them by the time he wanted to realize why his arms suddenly hurt so much and why she was laughing that close to his ear._

_“I think I’ve got_ you… _” he said, and they’d erupted into twin giggles, like the children within that they’d only just outgrown._

_“Koschei?”_

_“Yeah?”_

_“I think you can put me down now. Not such a big fall from here, you’re not that tall.”_

_“Right, yeah. Right. Sorry.”_

_Her feet scratched the ground once more, and she tugged at his hand, pointing with her index finger at the scraps of her machine._

_“Suppose I could fix it, would you jump?”_

_He nudged at her with his elbow._

_“Enough jumping for at least a month, eh?”_

_As if agreeing with his words, the exoskeleton caught fire, a tiny little flame that only incited them to laugh harder. They definitely wouldn’t be trying it on any time soon. He doubted it was even rescuable, and was about to ask her what her thoughts were when the first curtain of rain reached them._

_He hadn’t even noticed the exact moment the suns had been clouded._

_“Go back?” he said, watching her short hair get absolutely ruined in the rain._

_“Nah,” she’d said, shaking it off so it grew spiky and messy, framing her face. She had a way of smiling, then, that even with all her teeth showing, he felt like it was still the grin of a toothless little child, excited to be in the world as a small, curious part of it. “It’ll still be a while till they notice we’re gone, won’t it? Let’s just… stay here a little longer.”_

_And so they’d sat cross-legged right there in the rain, holding hands, and watched the last embers of her last impossible project fade away until dusk had fallen, their stomachs had demanded their undivided attention more than each other did, and life had gone on, as it often did, without need for explanations as to why the Doctor kept going out of her way to make a tall scrawny kid happy, as to why the Master would postpone long afternoons cramming his beloved books just so he could be with her a few minutes more, indeed._

“I know who you are, Thete.” Her name. Her nickname. Very, very old, now hardly spoken. But in the final vapors of the memory, as new as it was back then, and as important. “Listen to me, listen… I know who you are, I’ve always known… and it’s not this. This isn’t you, they took you away from you, they took us away from each other.” Gently, he removes his hands from her face to hold her own. “This isn’t who _we_ are.”

It isn’t. Never in their long lives have they known how to not let regeneration break them out of the dying process. Not even when they wanted to. Curiosity, hope, and stubbornness always were too strong in them to just let death come before it was final, inescapable.

A new wave of many memories, gentle touches given by the matrix that she had not lingered on earlier, resurfaces in her mind. They pool in her, drops falling in and making them bigger and bigger, until a memory the matrix didn’t need to return to her, so very translucent and always terribly present, overgrows every other that is coming back to her now.

“It’s who we were…” she mutters.

With time, other many things were thrown their way, and what once began as a mere rivalry between close friends to see who’d jump higher, who’d stay up the longest, who’d fight the hardest, eventually escalated into something she’s never really forgiven him for. After long years, a slow ascent of choices drove him to it, as she stood witness to everything, without being aware at first, and then… without knowing how to stop it. His betrayal.

_At the end of a very long road, away from the early moments of a life they had once called home, a renegade and a rebel had met once more, friends a final time before he severed his oaths in front of her, undid the laws they’d been taught to abide by, and sent his entire prodigious education flying. All in the name of… his own making, a name that had been whispered around the universe years ago and that she’d chosen never to pay attention to, because her hearts had known, yes, even then._

_“No…” That had been all she’d been able to say, when she’d realized he was leaving for good, and that there’d be no stopping him. Because there had been no stopping him for a while._

_“Yes! This time, yes.”_

_“Don’t do this, Kosch—” she’d said warningly._

_She should have known better than to use his Academy name, so far outside the Academy, so many years past their youths._

_“You know that’s not my name. Say it,” he’d hissed through his teeth. “Call me by my name.”_

_“That’s_ not _your name,” she argued. “The second you use it for this? It becomes a title you never deserved, not a name. And certainly not yours.”_

_“But it is, now. And it will always be. The name in your nightmares. Like those monsters, remember?” He chuckled mercilessly, like he’d forgotten what those monsters meant, what it meant once to have shared them with her. “_ I _will be your monster from now on.”_

_“No,” she said, in the end, in the silence. “No, you’re wrong. You’ll be nothing to me except… a memory. And a mistake. You’re nothing but_ my _mistake. And I’m sorry for making you.”_

She has spent eternity trying to mend it. And not once, ever, has she stopped to think, to acknowledge the tremendous weight it piled on her shoulders, her back, her mind, to have carried it silently everywhere she went. Until now.

“Why couldn’t you have fought with me… forever?” the Doctor says, now in the calm after the storm, her voice tinted with grave nostalgia.

Even without reliving the same memory, the Master doesn’t need anything but her proximity, her sudden change in inflection, to remember just as accurately. To suffer it just as he had, then.

“Because I was stupid,” he confesses, “because I thought it’d make me better than you, and the stars only know I would have killed to be half as good as you are. Because I—I wanted to stand by your side and be more than a shadow. More than a friend, more than a… companion. I wanted to be the reason you’d fight wars for.”

“And so you were…” she whispers in the knowledge and recollection of the history of _their_ wars.

“Millions of years, millions of _lives_ wouldn’t be able to fill the holes that choice left in me, Doctor. I’ve grown to regret it all. And I’m… I’m sorry, truly, for every day, every new choice that came afterwards.”

It’s nothing he hasn’t said to her before. But it’s nothing he’d have ever dared say to the Doctor of War.

She’s quiet for a moment.

“Then fight this one with me.”

“What?”

“I have to go back. To end it. For good,” she says. “And now I’ve… I’ve remembered some more. And I’m finally ready…” What happened on Gallifrey, what led her to act against it, all that people left behind, she cannot let that slide when she knows her early solutions never helped except to make it all worse. “So come with me.”

She offers him her hand. They can be rebels again against Gallifrey, as they would have been, historically, if they hadn’t been too caught up in their own stories to team up. And this time their reasons differ enough from their teenage fascination with revolution. She hopes to put everything right, if she can, and then find a path back to herself.

The herself she can intuitively feel under the chaos, now no longer a void.

“I’m ready,” she says again, swallowing her pride, her doubts, to tell him the words that seal the deal: “I trust what I’ve seen, who I’ve seen you be with me. I trust you. And I want you to fight with me this time.” He thinks she’s the closest thing to the Doctor she’s forgotten, when he hears her say to him in that hopeful tone: “Third time’s the charm?”

An enormous wave of fuzzy warmth takes over him at that word, at ‘trust’. She is finally there where he had lost all hope she ever would. Then, quite suddenly, his excitement transforms into seriousness and solemnity. He can’t jump mindlessly into this. It’s Gallifrey where she’s telling him to go, it’s the oldest war of wars, and if he ventures in, there is no telling what it’ll do to him. It always did end up drawing him in too deep.

And yet… this is what they were meant to do, almost prophesized to, and never did. The war that dug trenches between them, far larger than the existing ones. This is the people, the conflict, the place that tore the Doctor away from herself… away from his side. They have to set it right.

“I’ll always fight with you,” he says, solemnly, quietly. “Even if those bastards got a hold of me, rid me of who I am, I’d still find a way back to you.”

She lets the silence respond for her, unsure of how to feel.

As the rain calms down, so do they, breathing in the scent of petrichor and taking a break from the whirlpool of emotions that has outranked the storm above their heads, perhaps even shattered it.

Later, they help each other come down from the hill, and as they descend it together, they discuss her existing approach to end the Dalek attacks, and the many ways it can be turned around so that it would work for contained actions against the Council as well.

The only way for Time Wars to truly end is to either stop them from ever beginning… or to annihilate their epicenter, and no war can go on with both sides of it unable to fight it, not even this one.

“I’ve been working with someone on the inside,” she says on their way back to the TARDIS. “To develop an idea for a mass range inhibitor against the Daleks.”

“Hidden?”

She doesn’t have to ask who from.

“Yeah.”

He hums to himself.

“How, though? You’d need to get really up close and personal to a living Dalek in order to infiltrate their network.”

“I know,” she says. “But nobody’s infiltrating it, we’re only altering it so it’ll fail, so their bodies will, too. And for that, we only needed carcasses to tear open.”

He understands at once.

“Lot of them falling in the desert lately.”

“Exactly,” she replies.

They walk in silence until the two TARDISes cut the horizon, the sky, in two. Grey and orange and blue. His steps get quicker until he’s slightly ahead of her.

“I want you to join me and my acquaintance,” she says, a little breathless as she catches up with him. “You’ve been an ally to the Cybermen often enough, you should have learned new ways to hurt a Dalek we might be able to use.”

“Three heads do think further than two…” he says, agreeing to her suggestion. Then, he smirks widely. “And maybe I’ll have some pointers for whatever you two had in mind.”

“Of _course_ you will…” she half-mumbles, half-groans, but even as she looks away from his eyes at the ground they’re walking on, he can see that she’s smiling.

Behind them, the storm clouds slowly begin to drift away.

* * *

An informant knocks on the heavy doors to the Council chamber. When let in, they remain unsure a second longer than supposed to, and the booming voice of their Lord President commands them inside.

“Well? What news are there? Come on in and speak up, we don’t have all day.”

Their eyes blink instinctively at the darkness of the room contrasted with the piercing light of the windows, then they push past their initial response to do as told.

“The pilots are all ready, sir. They…” The informant clears their throat. “They asked about this mission’s purpose. And about the protective dome. Should I warn the engineers to lower the shields enough to let them through?”

The President waves his hand dismissively.

“No, not a word to the engineers. They were already helpful enough with the TARDIS modifications. Very much indeed…”

“Sir?” the informant insists. “What should I tell the pilots, sir?”

Their eyes stray to a wall of screens, displaying images without sound of a desert in a storm and two figures clinging to each other as the wind picks up, shouting to each other, by the looks of it. In the blink of a moment, the informant wonders who they are, and what they might be saying that once was of some interest to the Council yet now has been entirely forgotten in favor of… this; their message to carry back and forth from this room to the hangars, to the young Time Lords fresh out of the Academy, ready to fly for their people and planet.

The President cackles at the informant’s persistence.

“They have all the information they need already. _You_ brought it to them, did you not?” he says.

“Yes, sir…” they mutter.

The President goes on, relentless.

“They know exactly for how long to fly and where and when and in which order to deploy from the Citadel. So tell them, please, to get going and… not to make me wait with ridiculous inquiries. It is time.”

“Yes, sir.”

The informant bows to him and quickly exits the room.

A murmur follows in the Council as the doors close behind them.

“And what of the Doctor, Lord President?” someone asks in a hushed tone.

“The Doctor?” Rassilon laughs slowly, cherishing every single sound he utters. “Too busy having a long overdue existential crisis, I’m afraid.”

The room echoes his laughter.

After all, it is a plan of their own making, using the Doctor to get the information that will allow them to ascend today, as the pilots fly without anyone else outside this Council knowing why. Now that they have what they need, and she’s ceased to be useful, what do they care if the slow-burning self-destruction of her own mind ends her? Not in vain did the Council put it there in the first place to convince her to join their war against her will, for as long as that would last, and however much that would actually help against the Daleks. It was always meant to consume her, one way or the other, in the end.

“She won’t be any bother to us…” the President says, turning to the wall of screens, and switching them all off with a sinister grin and a turn of his gauntlet. “Not any longer.” He raises his hands up as he stands up bearing the wear of limbs rarely used. “My lords…”

One by one, the Council members leave their chairs for the first time in a long time. The ascension is soon to begin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although the actual show hasn’t developed Gallifreyan as a language (they just do cool circles, but in their defense I’ll say, it’s _really cool-looking circles_ ), you might be pleased to know, as I was when I was doing my worldbuilding bit on baths and murals and gravestones, that the fans went ahead and did create it as a [conlang](https://tgcp.ucoz.com/). It’s the coolest shit I’ve ever seen, and I’m saying this as a person who has tried and failed to learn Elvish, Dothraki, and Klingon, which are already pretty cool. All the material is available online, I’m just, like, thank the heavens for fandom. There’s even an [online transcriptor](https://adrian17.github.io/Gallifreyan/)!


	5. Now our Gallifrey burns no more

The TARDIS hums in the background, and he hears whispers in between her silences. What a lovely sound to return to.

“Hello, old friend…” he mumbles back, a hand tracing the contour of the console.

Around him, room. Just… room. He’d always thought it close to impossible, cramming the entrance to a TARDIS until it no longer fit a single item more. Then, of course, he had to leave Earth with stacks and stacks of paper and enough pens on his luggage to last him years. At the end of the day, he always had one more idea to write down, to keep close and in sight, than the literal room, full of diagrams and hanging maps and connecting threads, could allow.

And yet here it’s all organically unoccupied, as it’s ever been. This TARDIS waits for people to fill the empty space, not words. Words, in the end, are gone with the wind, with time and wear and every new choice. People leave much more lasting memories.

_Or so they should…_

Little does that matter now, when the only thing they are waiting for is the right time to fly back into war. As if no time had passed at all and all of this had only been a bleep, a glitch in his own memory, not the Doctor’s. The horrors he lived in the Time War are long gone and can’t ever come back, because they’re fixed and burned to ashes, but now there are new horrors to face. Nameless, terrifying horrors to populate his dreams that, ironically, cannot compete with his intention of finding justice. For her, for their home. Maybe even for himself.

“So, what’d you think?” the Doctor’s voice calls from the entrance to the corridor.

He immediately turns towards her, and any expectations he might have held dissipates in the very air the second his eyes take her in. She walks into the light without looking at him, adjusting one of her shirt sleeves from under her tux jacket. Blinking the breath back into his body, he has to force himself to look twice. It is indeed the same tux; she has never before had this small a body, none of the old ones would fit her. But… whatever machine she’s thrown it in to wash it, to press it, the fabrics have resurfaced with some of their old shine. Every single crease of it, both the natural ones of the fabric and those owed to time and use, molds to her every move, and he thinks to himself that the Doctor should never wear anything but suit pants and jackets and suspenders. Whoever introduced her to the world of suspenders deserves life-long, daily royalties simply for the fact that they add a texture to her that he cannot stop trying to understand. Now, without an enmity to untangle, without two swords between them, without memories to make sense of for the both of them, it is so much easier to stand before the Doctor in a tux and feel like a fifteen-year-old in a desert under the light of too many constellations to count, being asked by a much younger Doctor, in differently cut jackets and coats and pants, to tell her the story of every star, even when they both already knew them all.

“Well?” the Doctor says now, still not quite daring to look him in the eye.

The Master clears his throat and his memories. One, of hesitance. The other, of nostalgia.

“Bringing down a government while dressing fancy, a perfect plan…” he tries to joke. He puts his hands in his pockets, for the simple reason that he doesn’t know how to stand, or how to exist, and his hands give it away. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in… literally anything else, though?”

The Doctor does lift her head just enough so that there can be said to be some semblance of eye contact, even with the console between them, its flares mostly intercepting it.

“Maybe,” she admits. “But I _know_ these clothes. They’re no cause of struggle.” Before he’d even think of asking, she adds: “The struggle to remember.”

In black and white, her feelings about herself are centered only around the certainties. Even for him, who is used to a spectrum of brightness on her, a gradient cut on two sides simplifies his own perceptions and doubts. And he’s grateful for the lack of color, now. A rainbow wouldn’t be fitting in the place where they are going, in the mind of who she is right now, despite everything.

He makes a small appreciative noise to let her know she looks fine and would in anything she decided to wear.

“Ready to leave, then?”

The Doctor leans sideways, out of the console’s way, to pointedly look him up and down.

“Dressed like that?” she says.

The Missy in him is so proud at her for saying that. Normally, the Doctor would have so much trouble comprehending fashion as a concept, let alone pointing tips out.

Still, raising his palms, he looks down at himself to humor her, then shrugs.

“What’s wrong with it?”

She ogles his rolled-up and very dirty sleeves that once were a uniform color, just like her white shirt, and his vest, splotchy with old mistakes and times. At this point, she isn’t even sure she wants to pay any attention to the surface of his purple pants that, just like hers, do not reach.

“Nothing,” she says, reciprocating his shrug. “It’s just…”

For comparison, the Doctor waves lazily at her own clothes.

“Ah,” he says. In all honesty, he agrees. There is no way they can arrive on Gallifrey all ready to wreak havoc there for the final time and do so while looking so uncoordinated. “So maybe there’s something for me back in the closet?”

After a brief moment in which she considers letting him in—further and further, until she can no longer regret it anymore—, they head back where she just came from. She finds herself looking over her shoulder at him, and wondering just how long they must have spent together in those flashes of the past she has recently gotten for him to know the way without needing to follow her steps closely. Once she’s been through enough companions, she can definitely tell when someone’s following where she’s going or simply going there with her.

In fact, when they reach the closet, she realizes how quick he is to open the door and walk in first himself, to lead the way as if she was the one who needed guidance, even though this is where she keeps moments in time, frozen, for her to always remember and relive later when that time comes back up again. Such is the strong power of clothes, ornaments, and small fragments of history; they end up absorbing so much, without anyone noticing often, until times have passed, and all a person can do is fondly reminisce about them.

The Doctor’s closet, like the Doctor’s life, exists in a state of utter, disconnected mess to everyone, including herself unless she’s terribly inspired. Despite the massive size of the room, large enough that one could get lost in it if the lights dimmed and the door closed, only a few hangers are available next to the wall. The rest is piles and piles of poorly folded clothes just about anywhere horizontal, drawers of dubious origin and condition stacked on top of each other to save space, and boxes where the amount of clothes in them overflows the cardboard edges.

Even after all the time the Doctor’s had alone in the TARDIS, she’s never actually found the _time_ to put a couple of mirrors in there. The Master smiles at the thought that she’d never find checking an outfit interesting enough to actually do that.

In all that mess, her longsword from France is hidden between sleeves and coat hangers, where she last put it to then forget about it. It feels like it’s been forever since that, since they crossed blades, and he got the wound that still tenses the skin around it, a scar now.

The Doctor seems to be looking at the sword as well. When they walk in, she sighs. Among every single piece of clothing hoarded and left behind over the years, nothing except what she is presently wearing and the weaponly accessory of that sword, the outfits from lives old past, reminds her of anything but dust and oblivion. They take the truest shape of oblivion she has ever known, the blurry edges of a void that she’s more aware now. Pushing past the Master, she makes her way through the disaster until she finds what she’s expecting must be around here, somewhere.

Once there, she silently thanks herself for being smart enough to put all her old tuxes and suits together in the same place. Back into the depth of the room, past columns of coats and many hats, they hang neatly enough. She picks one up and frowns at it, not really sure of why it rings a bell. Generic as it is, there’s no reason why it should, but it is the last on the hanger, and when she brings it closer to her nose, she thinks she can pick up a faint scent of… space train engines.

With a quick turn, she almost smacks it onto the Master’s chest.

“This one?” she says, as he’s having a proper reaction to such sudden movement on her part.

His fingers hold the fabric close, trying to fit it over his clothes.

“Mmmmm… Bit long for me, but it’ll do,” he says in a very amused way. The Doctor’s had so many tall bodies, of course her past clothes would hardly fit him.

The next thing she slams against his chest, practically on his face if she’d aimed a bit higher, is something an old version of her couldn’t have lived without.

“I lost the one that was supposed to come with the suit,” she says, apologetically.

* * *

Like a teenager let loose at the shops, the Master emerges out of the little corner of the room ready to hear her every thought, even the nonconsequential ones. Where the shirt, waistcoat and jacket are a bit tighter on him than he would have liked, he’s straight up had to rummage around for a needle and some thread to quickly fix the lengths of the pants, and now the slapdash result of rolled-up and sewn pant cuffs perfectly rest a little above his ankles, just as he likes it. Alone behind the curtains of clothes, he’s also draped the bowtie the Doctor gave him over his neck, but he hasn’t actually tied it. One end of it already hangs lower than the other when he twirls before her slightly frowning expression, hoping to get her opinion but not really asking for it.

The Doctor arches an eyebrow and muses her chin.

“You’re not tying that?” she points at his neck.

He looks down on reflex.

“I don’t know if it’s very me.”

“I have a feather boa or two around. I could fetch those, if they’re more _you_ ,” she says, barely containing the humor tinge in her words.

The Master rolls his eyes.

“I’m not that dramatic.”

She ignores him and, breaching the few feet between them, reaches straight for his shirt collar to tip it up and smooth the black fabric of the tie against it. She tugs at the longest end of it with practiced deftness until she’s certain it’s long enough, then crosses it over the shorter end. Because of the proximity to his neck, exposed in these conditions, she takes a moment, an infinitely small moment between heartbeats. It’s unspeakably strange, to be putting a bowtie on someone else. Especially when the ‘someone’ is him.

Despite the closeness of her hands, almost brushing sensitive skin, the Master holds his breath and thus his ground throughout. A surge of pride grows inside him when he realizes it’s not as distracting as he thought it would be, to be under her control in such a fine, precise way that allows no movement. He is not so much as letting his muscles contract.

“Earlier, before,” he says, gently, eyes refusing to focus on anything but the vagueness of her fingers a little below his chin, looping the longer end behind the cross with the shortest. “What made you say you trusted me? What memory?”

Even without their bodies touching, the Master can feel her take a deep breath.

“Nothing in particular,” she replies, her voice soft, since she’s half-focused on something else. “Just… all of it, together, the timing…”

A hunch. It had simply come upon her, just as the jumble of past and present had been regurgitated back into her head. A hunch that he’d always kept more from her than she’d ever know and, even so, this time he wasn’t lying by omission.

The Doctor’s hand places the shorter end and wraps the longest over it, then back into the knot.

A flash of purple and black swallows her whole. That past existence, in this very same ship, wearing this very same outfit… It shakes her to the core. This is the outfit she _woke up_ to in the Matrix Chamber. And now… now she’s seeing how it came to be hers, she’s seeing why.

_A bowtie…_

_I wore one of those for that entire life when you and I didn’t see each other._

_I would have recognized you in three seconds flat. With your hands all wavy, and your hair, and your flair._

She blinks away her confusion at what may as well be one of the last memories she’d had before they’d all been erased from her. Time has moved without her, without even asking, and now she has to run to catch up again. Thank the stars she’s always been good at running…

_And at tying bowties…_

An entire life wearing them. She’s forgotten an entire life of bowties. She’s forgotten that this is why, probably, she ever learned to knot them in place. Why else, if she’s always been a fashion emergency walking? Missy had said so, when the Master was Missy.

“…the… feeling,” she says now to him, struggling to remember what she’d said before, here, in this closet room with him, in these clothes, and not those spoken far away, ago, “from memories in which you weren’t there…”

All that exists in her now is the echoes of purple and black. The bright explosion in her mind reaching every corner of it, filling it with something even more powerful than certainty. Reality. _Reality_ has flooded in. And this is the first memory, in all he has returned to her, in all that might have made it back through dreams, that feels like part of that reality, a solid, irrefutable part that she could never have denied, not even back in that Matrix Chamber.

“Is it important?” she asks, looking up at him, tugging at the folds of the finished tie to adjust it. Her hands smooth it over a couple of times as she makes an effort not to make eye contact. Because they’re at a height, it is almost impossible for her to avoid it eternally. “Or is it just one of your questions?”

He smiles at that.

“Bit of both, I’d say.”

“Yeah,” she says, half-sighs. “Figured.”

Quickly, her hands near his neck slide away back at her sides, and he mourns once more the exactitudes, the platitudes of her touch. Even this impersonal, even this… professional. They’re all he has of a before that’s never coming back, that can’t be traveled back to.

“I don’t _trust_ you like we’re friends,” she explains. “Or like when we were. But I trust you enough to do this with you and not be constantly looking out over my shoulder in case you decide to, I don’t know, set a trap in the middle of the city for whoever ends up falling in it.”

He nods. “That’s good enough for me.”

It’s going to have to be. So many things are.

When he takes a couple of steps forward and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Doctor, even without mirrors for their image to reflect on, the both of them can feel it in their hearts. A rhythm only true, only audible to the Doctor and the Master, come from Gallifrey, fled from Gallifrey, and now returning with a truce between them, and a purpose in common. The rhythm of old tales, once more being whispered in the soft, eternal wings of time that will carry it far across the universe.

Doctor and Master, Master and Doctor. The most feared myth the Time Lords ever admitted to wanting to prepare for, and it was brewing on their very own grounds. A myth, a legend, a reality. They heard it so much during childhood, as a reprimand for what their respective talents should never associate with if they wanted to ever preserve them in the long run. As grown-ups, barely out of an institution that never cared or understood, it had been the sound of mischief, of an authority coming down to rub it in their faces, that they might be _two_ and they might be _great,_ but legends don’t live long and, most importantly, the parts in them don’t live happily nor get the recognition each deserved. Master and Doctor, Doctor and Master. Now, it’s coming at them all with the force no one recognized as anything but child play, and it will be recorded in history like the change Gallifrey needed. Like the spark that began it.

Together, they fall into stride on their very first step out of the closet room.

* * *

Historically, this was always called the TARDIS port, but as the Master steps out of the Doctor’s own time machine, neatly parked on one of the available slots by the corridor, he’s hit with a wave of that unrecorded history the mind only brings back when in context, nowhere else. Around the Citadel, in the dark of the night, soon-to-be Time Lords whispered another name for the dim, grey hallways where routines came to die and adventures might begin, end, and be stuck forever in the same place—all three. They’d called it the TARDIS graveyard, because some of those beautiful cylinders of the most advanced engineering that Gallifrey had ever coincidentally happened into creating had landed once to never take off again. The death of time, if time could ever end.

“Okay?” the Doctor asks curtly.

He just mhmms.

“Been a while, that’s all…”

“I’ve clearance, so they won’t think to track us here, but someone _might_ recognize you.”

“Last time I was here, I looked… a bit different,” he says, smirking.

“Yeah, but the juxtaposition’s a little obvious. Me returning with company when usually they see me alone, both of us looking like this with no intention behind it that’s clear to a casual observer… What would we, realistically, be up to??”

Even though he agrees he’d be caught the second someone thought to scan him like the last time, they don’t have much of a choice. Thankfully, the port is a little empty, with too many of the TARDIS slots already vacant, and they don’t run into anybody in the soldier branch that might jump to the right conclusions. A few floors up, a few soldiers do pass them, but they seem so concentrated on the places they’re going that they don’t even notice the Doctor is back.

On the final steps to the workshop, the Master actually allows himself a moment to breathe in the feeling of _home._ Lost so long ago, forsaken in stubbornness first, then in resignation.

“D’you remember?” he asks softly.

“That we used to sneak in any workshop we could find and steal all kinds of stuff?” she says, almost dismissive in her hurry to go inside. “Yeah.”

She’s the first to walk in, careful to keep her eyes on all corners of the room. There doesn’t seem to have been many changes since she left. The peeled-off armors of the Dalek carcasses take up corners in layers of various width and color. She doesn’t want to know what Gat and the engineers did with the actual dead Daleks that used to inhabit them. Some chunks of armor needed, after all, to be torn off as well to manufacture the weapon models, their prototypes now forgotten in a ruinous state over most of the workshop desks. On the floor, barely leaving any free space at all, tubes of all sizes and materials and colors cover the smooth surface that should be metal. They gather in bigger numbers towards the center of the room, a few feet away from the corner desks, where a giant mountain of the most varied pieces of mechanic equipment, Dalek parts, and wiring conceals the familiar silhouette of a crouching Gat.

Taking a general peek at the room to make sure no one else is here, the Doctor immediately wades past the workshop mess to get to her. The closer she gets, the more she sees just how deeply greased up Gat has gotten by working in such conditions. She’s put her air up in a ponytail, even rolled up her long robe sleeves.

“Gat?” she calls.

The engineer turns her head back in the Doctor’s direction.

“Oh, you brought company…” she says, as she elegantly rises from the floor.

“I… brought the Master,” the Doctor says. As she hears herself, she realizes how much of a concession it is. She half-points back at the Master, a few steps behind her, and tries to quickly glance at him when she continues, entirely missing the expression of frozen horror on his face: “This is Gat, by the way. Head engineer. She’s the one I talked to you about.”

The sound of his footsteps, recoiling from the both of them, are all that follows, until he literally crashes against something that was in the way, knocking it over and causing a ruckus, as well as the Doctor fully turning towards him, her eyes glaring out the perfect conveyed wording of _what the fuck are you doing_.

Gat rolls her eyes and wipes her hands on her brown leather pants, practically judging his reaction, in appearance almost fearful of her, who’s more than a few inches shorter than he is.

“Yeah, if we could get him to be quiet, that’d be great…” she says sarcastically.

The Master straightens up as if he’d never tripped, walks back to the Doctor, grabs her aside, and hisses angrily at her:

“She kidnapped you!”

The Doctor needs a second to order the events of the story in her head. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, using all her available energy so as not to flail her arms around as well.

“What’d you mean, kidnap me?”

“Did you think you’d just _gladly returned_ to fight this after what happened?” the Master dramatizes every single syllable. “’Cause I don’t think so! She—” He points an accusatory finger at Gat, who remains quietly crossing her arms, an eyebrow raised at them. “—kidnapped you to take you back. And, probably, since she’s a _head engineer,_ had a say in how your memories got erased, too.”

“…oh,” she says, eyes wide open now.

“Yeah, ‘oh’. You should change your name to that.”

“What didn’t you say anything before?”

“I didn’t know your _friend_ here was the one that started all of this. You never mentioned her name, or her appearance, or her _anything._ It’s _not_ my fault.”

The Doctor invades his personal space, standing on tiptoe to appear a little taller than he is.

“Well, it’s not mine either,” she says through gritted teeth but without any actual harming intent.

With a low sigh, Gat raises her hands slowly as if she wanted to get their attention to promptly calm them down afterward.

“Look, it’s true. It was me.” She takes a preliminary step in their direction, but her eyes, her voice, all addresses the Doctor, not him. “I didn’t know you. I was only following orders. The sooner I got it done, the sooner the war would be over. They told me that with you back in it, one way or the other, it’d end in our victory and _lives_ would be saved.”

“Well,” the Doctor says. Her body deflates until her feet are fully back on the ground, and her shoulders hunch with the weight of memories she cannot forsake, even if they’re still more a machine’s than they’re hers, more the Master’s story than her life. “They lied to you…”

The Master revolves on the spot, about to lunge forward at Gat. The Doctor grabs his right arm by the old wound she caused and manages to keep him still, her fingers tight on him.

“Why would you even _care_?” he spits out at Gat.

The engineer rolls her eyes.

“Because I live here?” she replies condescendingly. “And because there’s… people dying in the towns? Because the Daleks are trapped in here with us, pissed off as they’ve never been in bigger numbers, and no plan actually contemplates dealing with them first? The Doctor’s arrival made that perfectly clear, but before her we all thought the Daleks were a priority.”

The Doctor nods.

“I was just wanted for…” she struggles to finish.

She’s not even sure now what the Council truly wanted her for, despite having discussed it ad nauseam in her privacy of her own mind and with the Master. At the end of the day, the simple truth of it still escapes her in the fog of the void. They paraded her around, used her as they pleased without bothering to give explanations. She was their puppet, mindless and obedient.

Gat echoes her own sigh a couple of times, as if she was pondering information of value to her that the Doctor might need to consider herself.

“They had us chip you,” she finally confesses. “So they would monitor you. Without any memories, how were you to ever bring the bubble down? You’d never remember how in the first place. They were hoping _he_ would tell you, and thus them, if you ever let him get close enough.” Gat does something similar enough to smiling kindly. “Glad to see that was successful.”

One more piece into a puzzle that grows larger every single hour that she’s alive in. A chip, not a piece. Recording technology. The enemy, in her head. No wonder she feels this empty.

Energy pools in her head, ache without pain, where she imagines a little tiny flat board accumulating all the information she struggles to retain.

The Doctor stares intently at Gat.

“You mean to tell me… _they_ ’ve been watching everything I’ve done since…?”

“No, no. Not all of it. I don’t think they’d be interested in much more than your interactions,” she half-heartedly waves at the Doctor and the Master to contextualize that ‘your’.

The Doctor swallows, uncomfortable at that notion. Exactly in that description of events, those containing the two of them, exists the lowest of the lows she can remember.

“And I’m correct in assuming _you_ put it there as well?” the Master asks Gat.

“Orders,” she says, shrugging.

The Doctor gets away from them for a second, pacing around even faster than she normally would, waving her arms around as she tries to find the thread that connects all her missing thoughts.

“That’s why you waited so long to talk to me about anything concrete,” she realizes.

“Technically, you’re still being… surveyed,” Gat replies. “So, technically, it’s still a risk to be talking to you at all. But I don’t care as much anymore. I made sure you’re made of what I needed, that’s what matters.”

“Hang on a second,” the Master butts in. “She’s been locked in onto matrix technology. Recently,” he adds, as if he’d thought a second after that it might be an important detail. “How do we know that—?”

“Yes!” the Doctor says, rising an index finger towards the ceiling. “How can we know that it didn’t fry the… chip, thing?”

Gat snorts. Loudly.

“My team and I designed it, constructed it, and put it in you,” she enunciates slowly. “Don’t be so cocky.”

“So you can take it off,” the Doctor says. “Now. Probably without your team.”

Gat nods, mentally calculating what that would entail. “Probably, yeah.”

“Okay, because I’m going to need to be free of it for what we’re about to do.”

As it turns out, the immediacy of ‘what they’re about to do’ is hold the Doctor down on a stool, four arms pressing her down on it while her body tries to squirm free and Gat hoists interlaser tools too close for anyone’s comfort. Not more than a few minutes later, though, sore-muscled and frazzled, Gat has managed to extract, without as much as needing to slice her forehead open, a tiny piece of metal smaller than her thumbnail.

The general sigh, echoed from one to another, is loud and self-explanatory.

“Don’t celebrate just yet,” Gat warns.

She takes the piece onto a desk, where she meticulously prods it with several of her finest, thinnest-point tools until she’s certain the mechanism is off. They all hold their breaths as she silently finds ways around her own designs, and for the longest minutes, it seems as if every tremor in her fingers might ruin the sensible technology, but then Gat drops her tools on the desk with a thud and swivels on her chair.

“Okay, _now_ you can,” she says.

In the silence of a few seconds, they let relief wash over them. Even if it’d been so short-lived, the pressure of knowing she could have been spied on the whole time, have been feeding her secrets to her truest enemy al this time… it’s certainly a weight off to be free of it.

After a while, the Doctor walks towards the Dalek mass inhibitor, picks it up, and lifts it up in the poor light of the workshop to inspect it from a few different angles.

“We should really get around to finishing this now…” she says, her head practically below the inhibitor to see if there’s anything loose from the outer layers where the wires poke out.

“Right,” Gat agrees, wiping sweat off her forehead with her forearm. She drags her chair towards the desk where she keeps the latest prototype she and the Doctor worked together on, a small-ish circular plate of metal scraps all melted together into a hotspot that still has a few wires poking out of it. “Bit unstable still. I’m not sure it’ll reach the desired range; I haven’t tested it yet either…”

“Well, what are we here for? Let’s get our hands dirty…” the Master says.

He pushes up his sleeves, moves towards the pile of junk and machinery at the heart of the workshop, and steals the inhibitor out of the Doctor’s hands. She leaves them up in midair, taken by surprise.

Gat crosses her arms and purses her lips at him from the other side of the room.

“And how do you intend to test it on a living Dalek? They’re not exactly quiet, it’d be a dead giveaway just bringing one here.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor says, wrinkling her face a little, “we’ll just cross that bridge when we come to it.”

The three of them practically have to fight over desk space, stools, and who gets to stick cables into one of the Dalek carcasses to measure the inhibitor’s attachment to their various webs. Soon enough, the Master reviews a few details that might have compromised the strength of the connection, and by the time the Doctor silently shows approval to his own, both stare at Gat in unison, almost decided towards the same action at once.

“What?” the engineer half-grumbles, almost done with a few retouches to the actual hardware that will allow the inhibitor to be activated, which will render the Daleks as useless as they come. No weapons, no neuroweb, no motor functions besides landing safely.

The Doctor shrugs at her.

“Nothing, it’s just… Now that this is more or less done—”

“Testing pending,” the Master and Gat say at the same time, prompting them to glare at each other once they realize.

“Testing pending,” the Doctor agrees. “But now that it’s done, why not take it a step further? Why not… spend some time on a proper _treason_ plan?”

“About time, Doctor,” Gat replies. “About damn time.”

She stares judgingly at the Master.

“Oh, don’t make that face,” she tells him. “The spyware is _out_ of her. We can say ‘treason’ if we want to.”

Making a big deal out of ignoring him, Gat’s frown subtly transforms into a smirk of absolute satisfaction.

The Doctor knows very well how to interpret that.

“We can do a lot more than that,” she says, pretty sure Gat’s thinking the same thing.

“How? If you’re doing the proposing here. And I’m assuming you are,” the Master says, a hint of humor dyeing the edge of his words.

The Doctor rubs both her temples with her fists, eyes firmly shut.

“Not quite there yet. I’m… on the way of getting there, eventually getting there,” she says.

From her chair, Gat turns a little to the Doctor.

“An idea would be to render them just as useless as the Daleks. In the best way we could think of,” she says. “Obviously not… pressing a button and goodbye motor functions. I wish it was that easy…”

“You’ve been building guns, haven’t you?” the Master asks her, swiveling around on his own chair so he can locate the pile of assorted weapon prototypes abandoned here somewhere. “We could use that.”

The Doctor shakes her head.

“No can do,” she says. “Meant to counterattack against the Daleks, not… you know. Annihilate unkillable governors.”

The Master abstains from saying anything to that. He used to make the choice to kill first, think later, and knows by now that it hardly ever ends well. Back then, it didn’t, mostly because he had the Doctor on the opposite side. And now that things have changed, maybe he just doesn’t feel comfortable falling off the road he’s chosen time after time, even if she’s the one egging him on to leave it now. Massacring the previous government will splotch up whatever comes after in the worst possible way. They deserve a chance to repent and do better like he’s tried to, or, if they really won’t, then pay for their mistakes.

“Are we literally aiming to kill?” Gat asks. “Because… okay by me.”

It takes a long time for the Doctor to reply to that. A longer time than she thought it would, considering. Two Gallifreys, she thinks to herself. One burned, the other she unraveled from the ashes of the previous so that it’d never burn again. And yet, now, she’s ready, after all, to let some of its people burn anew, if it’ll save the rest of the planet, of the universe. She may not _remember_ how it happened, or who she was when it did, but she knows right now as a person with a similar choice, what the Doctor back then must have gone through. Kill some to save some. Or wait and watch destruction come about in the eventuality of time.

“If necessary,” she finally says solemnly. “But the Council _cannot_ be allowed to ever break through that bubble and ascend. And the sooner they’re stopped, the better for us all.”

“Wait, ascend?” Gat asks, confused.

They quickly explain ascension to Gat and the engineer, after a few lives stuck on a war of deceit, just stares at them with the weariness of a warrior. Then, in the heat of some arguing about whether or not the Council will ever dare to do it, the implications of them having almost already done it, the Doctor’s eyes pop wide open and she lifts her hands up as she yells out in awe at herself.

“Access to the neural Time Lord web might grant us control over their ascension, if we tangibly linked them to Gallifrey, beyond the physicality of their own bodies, and thus kept them from ascending at all!” she rants out all at once. Then yells out again. “It might just work!”

“She’s there…” the Master says to himself.

“Time Lord telepathy is—” Gat says, slowly, eyes half closed in an effort not to roll them.

“Fine, and thin, and strange, and complicated,” the Doctor says so very quickly, a chorus to the million ideas she’s already built on in her head. “And, to be honest, not worked on or explored all that often.”

“So that is how we do it,” the Master says.

Gat arches an eyebrow, alternating between staring at one of them, then the other.

“How, though?” she asks, trying to be the logical one in the collective chaotic energy they’re gathering off of each other. “That web is the inner core of Gallifrey’s telepathic population, a layer of information in permanent motion that’s almost as thick as the planet’s crust. Who is strong enough to infiltrate something so vast for so long without losing themselves in all those minds?”

The Master smiles softly. He doesn’t even have to point fingers, or look anywhere to let it transpire that Gat has asked the question the universe is always answering for every person who thinks it.

“Someone who has already been lost. To her own mind,” the Doctor replies slowly with newly found confidence and a fated hunch in the depths of her chest, where two hearts meet, that perhaps there was a reason for her voids and her confusion, after all. A loophole that makes it useful, at the end of everything. “And survived it.”

There’s a murmur of general agreement in which it seems to come to them, the possibility that this is it, and that they’ve got nothing else to go on with.

“We’ll need to get a confession out of them,” the Master proposes. “Distribute it, we would be making more than history. We’d be letting history know about its own truth.”

“ _And_ we can use my chip by reactivating it to record all of it!” the Doctor practically shouts. Then, she turns to the Master and mutters in his direction: “Is it too obvious that I missed this?”

He lets out a subtle smile her way and mutters back: “Yeah.”

No version of this day, of this thing that they’re doing, included a glimpse this beautiful, real, and deep into the Doctor from before. And if today everything ends, he will be thankful for that, among many things, before it’s all over.

“You want to reactivate it and send whatever we manage to record out into the entire planet?” Gat says, a little unbelieving, but clearly following the Doctor and the Master in their combined plan. “Every mind, every device?” She sighs loudly to soon enough shrug. It would be the only thing that would set an entire planet against the Council quick enough. It would give Gat an entire army, larger than actual armies, to fight them out of their chambers and thrones. “I could make that work.”

“No doubt you could,” the Doctor says.

With no time to lose, Gat slouches over her desk, several tools held in just one hand, and sets off to reviving the software barely breathing alive in the piece of her own engineering she just removed from the Doctor’s head, as the Master quickly strays over to the piles of junk, grabs a small metal box, a flamethrower, and begins shaping up what he hopes will be the device that broadcasts whatever information they end up procuring out into the world he once ran from.

* * *

“Weld those two together,” the Doctor says over his shoulder.

However long he’s spent on it, every second tick-tocks away fast enough with her leaning in last-minute to point at details she can just spot at a distance. Gat was too caught up in her own meticulous task, her face way too close to the chip that later on she inserted back into the Doctor’s head, and for some time now all she’s done is sit by the door, legs crossed and restless, not even paying attention to either of them anymore.

“Right,” the Master says, turning a little on his chair to look up at the Doctor. “Better range.”

Deftly, he modifies the inner workings of the almost remote, rerouting the wiring after her suggestion so that it’ll connect well once outside the city. He trims the small wires, brushes the remaining bits off the desk, and gingerly puts the outer covering, all in shiny metal, back on.

“I’d like to do a test run, first,” he tells her, fully facing her now as he swivels on the chair. “Something minor. Maybe an image of the suns?”

The Doctor shakes her head.

“It’d need to be something much _larger_ than that. Images would always send well. We don’t know how long it’ll take to get a confession out of them. And since it’s not live coverage...”

The door to the workshop is practically kicked open.

“Gat?”

The head engineer leaps out of her chair towards the group of armed people who have just come through, calling her.

“It’s almost ready,” Gat hurries to say. “You shouldn’t have come, it’s—”

A tall, lanky person in slightly worn attire, wearing the insignia of the astronomers on their overlong top, shakes their head.

“No time,” they say, the rest of their companions glancing out of the window, apprehensively. “The bubble’s down, Gat. We don’t know how, but they’ve managed to bring it down, I…”

Faster than the speed of light, the Doctor, the Master and Gat push past the newcomers in order to the get to the covered windows. They pull up the blinds until the bright skies of Gallifrey threaten to burn their retinas and, even then, they do not look away. Flashes, bursts of energy are exploding in the air, in the edges of where the bubble used to stand, disconnecting realities. Now, the thin membrane crumbles like glass in shards that are torn off it and yet never fall onto the desert, onto the city or the towns. Piece by piece, in painstakingly slow motion, the bubble fades out of existence, like time had unwound precisely to see it do so.

“It can’t be…” the Master mutters.

In the face of disaster, every pair of eyes in the workshop continues watching the spectacle. Gallifrey has not had skies this vast since before the war. Where beige had severed them clean, now white reigns supreme. And it’s a dizzying white. Or it would be…

The bubble had trapped two races away from each other. Two mighty civilizations, always at each other throats. Dalek saucers, cruisers, all either forced on the other side of it, or frozen forever halfway in or halfway out. Nothing stirs up old hatred, old fear, like the sight of the closest of those ships, rupturing the horizon in half for so long, now slowly propelling forward, finally free to bring what the Daleks always do onto the planet. And it will only be the first.

It has never been harder to be alive, to break a silence like this one.

“Everyone’s ready,” the astronomer tells Gat, their voice strained. “We have people in every center of population, prepared to take over the city. But we can’t just…”

“No, I know,” Gat practically groans. She rubs at her forehead as she makes her choice. She quickly walks to the Dalek inhibitor and slams her hand on it. “Tell everybody to wait. Tell all the towns to stay clear of any buildings, to erect their defenses if they have any. Screw this, a whole goddamn saucer is coming down on us all…”

Quicker than ever, as the newcomers begin pouring out the doors back into the corridors and the astronomer finishes his hushed conversation with Gat, the Doctor turns to the Master to whisper at him:

“We have to _do_ something. The Council’s entirely uncovered and any second now they’ll…” She can’t even say it. “These people have no idea.”

“Where is the ascension ceremony?”

“How am I supposed to know that?” she complains.

“Because you’re the one who found out about ascension back in the day _._ And you never told me about that little detail in the first place, so if you _don’t know_ now, then—”

The overwhelming sound of a slammed door interrupts him. Their eyes instinctively try to locate the cause and find Gat standing there still with a considerable number of armed people, still. Some bear the mark of the engineer’s trade, wearing matching clothes to Gat’s.

“They had us install private locks in the lifts to the main roof time ago. The big one that’s never been open to the public,” she says. “If I had to bet, I’d bet it’s there.”

The Master grabs the Doctor’s arm. He doesn’t need a second opinion. A plan is better than none.

“We have to go there _now._ ”

He tugs at her to get moving and as they do, the Doctor wiggles herself free.

“Wait,” she says, turning to Gat as well. Her eyes are poignant, older than anything she might ever grow to look, as they search for Gat’s sign of recognition in her own.

In all answer, she holds the Doctor’s gaze without recoiling from everything she can intuitively sense in it.

“It’s all up to you,” Gat says. “I’ll be watching everything they say. I’ll know when to send the transmission.”

The Doctor closes her eyes on the way out. A fragment of time elapsed between the moment she does and the moment they open again is all she needs to immerse herself in the neural web of her people. Murmurs of minds alive today interlace around one another in perfect representations of groups, clubs, societies within the domes of every last one of Gallifrey’s gatherings. She could follow them all, find people she thought lost once in memories returned to her, twice in the natural recollection of where should be now that the planet still stands. But no, she is not here today for children and grandchildren. One thought she allows herself to miss and mourn and love them, wherever they may be in the perfect tangles of sentience that spread outward from her mind into everything. Then, the Doctor moves on, because she has to, and the trails lead her to the Council’s ancient patterns of life. Prepared to be more than life, more than death, more than Gallifrey’s last ruinors. All it takes is the depth of thought she never imagined she was capable of before, when she didn’t realize there was more _depth_ to her than a few lives gained and forgotten. And, of course, even in her tiny size compared to the terrifying mass of all those beings joined together, the Doctor floods in and performs the groundbreaking task that anchors them permanently to her, to every last mind on Gallifrey.

She is hardly aware of her own body moving through the corridors, up the stairs, at first.

The levels of the Citadel pass her by, as easily as if she was being led across each and every one, up to the next one, in a maze of heights, not distances. Sometimes, if she pays attention to the connections in the webs of Gallifrey, she realizes she is. Someone like her is by her side.

When words are spoken, the outer layers of reality muffle them, and she merely nods to acknowledge them or murmurs a muddled response. Until, of course, her memory resurfaces at something that’s aching to pluck her of the trance of millions of presences, living.

This hallway, she’s already walked on, as different people. Once as a prisoner, the second time as an executioner.

This wall before her very eyes is but secret cells. She lifts a hand to meet the hidden door, and it flickers into sight as well as a tiny little window when the light inside switches on as well.

The web tugs impatiently at her. It floods motion, memory into her brain and, for once, she is absolutely sure that this is nothing of hers. Because she’s in them. Kicking and screaming as the memory holder, a soldier, drags her by force out of one of these two cells. Thrashing while in their custody so she can catch one last glimpse of the cell door, of this very window. And the face she’s leaving behind. The soldier’s thoughts push through the Doctor’s own recollection. Harsh, dulled, only just wishing to get their task done, but finding her absolutely annoying. She pushes back, harder. She thought something with the intensity of the sea during a storm that day, too. Something to outlive her, wasn’t it? Her, but mostly that other prisoner.

She remembers thinking, as she was being taken away, knowing for a fact what the Council would do to that prisoner now they had the Doctor, _How I wish I could see_ you _run now… I’ll remember, I’ll… I’ll always remember_. It hurts now to know she’d forgotten, to be this aware of what happened and yet feel the neater edges of the memory fade away of her reach.

The shock and physicality of a hand on her back startles her out of it.

“Are you okay?” The voice soothes out the transition.

“Yeah,” she quickly replies, dropping her own hand from the door. “Just… memories. Someone I loved, here...”

The Master seems to glance at the cells as if he were seeing them for the first time.

“Oh, that’s right…” he mutters to himself. Then, to her: “I never told you because I was never sure if you’d remembered, I guess now’s as good a time as any.” He half-laughs. “You don’t have to worry. She’s safe, I made sure to get her out of here. She’s back in her time.”

When something goes missing, you can always recreate it by the hole it left. She’s had to constantly reconstruct her own lost history, tying it to the one she actually remembers pristinely, with every new piece she gets back. Despite what she’d thought at the beginning, this might actually be the last thing she ever saw before she got her memories erased. Her own friend, watching her be dragged away like a wild, dangerous animal; her own friend, left behind to wait for execution. _Clara_ … she thinks now _. I think… her name was Clara_. The next thing she’d seen, she couldn’t forget, was under the pretense of being someone else, this false self that she can only call herself, and the next person she’d seen—the Master—she’d killed.

They’re going to make the culprits pay now. They’re going to stop them. That’s what she needs to remember and honor. Everything else can and shout wait.

“Come on, let’s go…” she mutters to the Master.

Sort of quietly, once they’ve resumed their long ascent into the roof of the main building, the Master says:

“It’s going to be fine, you sort of have practice at this.”

“I know. I’m not worried about that.”

“Then?”

She’s deadly serious when she speaks again.

“Can you really play the role I’m going to need you to out there?”

The Master snorts playfully. “Didn’t I play it to perfection for years? What difference will once more make?”

* * *

On the highest top of the Citadel, on the tallest building, the roof’s dome opens to an additional level in the already immense tower. A circular terrace without railings, without anything but markings on the floor and four platforms on each cardinal point that act as a lift, stretches on the smoothest surface of the sphere. Only the sky touches it. Standing on it, the whole of the Citadel and some neighboring towns appear as if painted on a canvas, perfectly within reach. And if one were to peek down, the dome-like shields of the Citadel would be perfectly visible.

The Doctor’s eye barely makes a note of it all when she and the Master, apprehended with his handcuffed hands behind his back, rise to the terraced platform.

Before them, every last member of the old Council has left their decrepit thrones to form a perfect circle, the center of which the President has appropriated for himself. Focused as they seem to be on the hums of the energy that binds it all, none notices the Doctor’s arrival nor her pushing the Master forward until they, too, are a part of the circle.

“The Master,” she announces. “As promised.”

The passivity in her voice should fool no one, but the Council members don’t truly know her, only her story.

In the silence of their patient wait, the Time Lords open their eyes to her, and what was briefly a simple removal of sound, now is a wave that rampages with each and every one of their consciences. They look at one another, trying to find someone among them who knows what to say. This was in no one’s plans.

“What is she even doing here?” one of them mutters in the impromptu chaos.

Another Council member clears their throat, louder than the other person’s voice was, and addresses the Doctor directly past the confusion she has stirred.

“Very well,” they say. “But as you can see—” Their long-sleeved arms point to the clear skies, stretching as far as the eye can see. Finally free. “—the task for which he was to be brought to us has already been completed without his aid.”

“And you’ll just let him out of your sights, now? Without thinking twice about the justice he owes to all the dead? He should be given a trial, made to repent and make up for every last crime committed that ever led to his last one, that bubble he was never going to swipe off our skies, even if you’d forced him to.”

Her teeth, gritted throughout, should have been a sign of how little she’s talking about just the Master. This is her intentions, perfectly clear for them all to hear, just as she spoke them once before in a day she only half-remembers.

All the Council does when exposed to her words is immerse themselves in a chorus of mutters, visibly caught red-handed and without any solid lie to send her off with on the spot, minutes before they dematerialize for good. Even Rassilon is twitching and desperately silent, unable to utter a sound that betrays his emotions.

The Doctor almost breaks character at the sight of him debating whether he should erupt into laughter or simply start crying and be done with the absurdity she’d brought along with herself.

“Well, if you’re asking me, and you’re clearly not, my lords,” the Master intervenes so as to tease more out of them, “I’d say… how about we call it off? It’s all already been done. You cannot accuse me of anything, not even that wretched bubble of yours which now you have kindly enough removed for me. As for any past deeds, time has made sure to erase all proof of my innocence or otherwise. And, even if it hadn’t and by some major force you were still able to procure some, I don’t think even the most ancient, paper-rotten of our laws contemplates what to do with an intertemporal criminal like me, eh? I could still fly free as a bird.”

He finishes with an over-the-top giggle that, if anything, does get Rassilon to move from twitching to pure seething.

Still, a Council member snorts in impatience.

“Have him thrown off the roof!” they suggest. “We’ve never needed him, least of all now. What does any of this matter? Time and space await! Let us ascend and leave this petty existence behind with those that always deserved to inherit it with just time enough to _burn_ alongside it.”

The shush from the circle comes too late. A murmur of thoughts fills the dome. Thoughts that reach the Doctor just as they’re being projected out of the minds they’re born from. Her teeth grind, her hands become fists. She digs her feet on the floors and almost forgets that her little reaction might have ruined the plan, almost forgets that she needs to keep them talking, now that they’ve started to. The Master’s shoulder cuts her off succinctly, regardless, and his eyes… When they meet hers, she can read the negative in them without needing to see him shake his head.

Rassilon’s booming voice speaks over the Council’s hesitation, unspoken and otherwise.

“We continue as planned,” he declares to the circle, raising both his arms to the skies where two suns shine down on a world of rusty sand and rock. He makes eternity out of the moment in which, before closing his eyes, he turns back towards the newcomers. “Doctor, you are late. I’d say I’m sorry, but you and I both know it would just be a kind lie and, after all, it must not escape you that I am everything but a merciful man.”

With all the Time Lords in position, hands pointing up in reverence as well, and Rassilon using the energy of his gauntlet, a humming of no voice and no thought pattern emerges out of the union of their minds, technically ready and on the hypothetical brink of leaving their bodies for good.

The Doctor screams out, not entirely just acting her part but channeling the tremendous effort it takes to stop the ascension:

“You’re not getting away with this, you can’t—”

This time, the Master lets her run off a few steps, her face a portrait in motion of rage and suffering cascading over the rest of her life. For a moment, he has trouble believing it’s entirely fake.

He can feel it, its immensity faded in his own mind. Their congregated, poor little attempts concealed behind an aura of sophistication that reeks of everything but, the Council let themselves be elevated far enough, away. None of them hear it, because they never have. The terrifying sounds of war coming together to form the decisive moment in which it either ends or begins again into a new day. Out there, shadows of it reach them. The thunderous engines of the Dalek saucers, out of control because their pilots have lost all mobility. The fires, cackling in the great distances.

No… To the Council, everything is their own minds. A communion so perfect, desired for so long. The Master is glad to only ever intuit it forming. A few steps before him, the Doctor’s usually so solid stance trembles as she carries the weight of the mental prison she’s constructed around them. He doesn’t want to even imagine how unbearably intense it must be if she’s wavering.

How unbearably _strong_ she must be, in her core, if she’s pushing through regardless.

Nothing is stronger than her mind, he reminds himself as he walks forward to the Doctor. Even bruised and battered, nothing could ever be stronger than her. Especially not Gallifrey’s so-called Council.

They find themselves opening their eyes a moment too soon, severed away from each other and their final goal in the precise breath where it all should have gone according to the plan. They return to the realm of physicality and find that, standing right next to the Doctor in a suit matching her own as well as his face matches her air of superiority, the Master has gotten rid of his handcuffs.

Like Daleks, every last member of the Council begins croaking.

“What happened? What happened? Explain!”

The Master snorts loudly once.

“The Doctor happened.” He snorts a second time to frame his words. “Late? She’s never been _late_ in her _life._ Courtesy of you all, by the way.” Slightly cocking his head to her, he adds, voice softer: “Want to do the honors?”

She nods at him and clears her throat.

“Feel that presence in the back of your head? That ground beneath your souls?” she taunts them, loud and boisterous, proud as a celestial body. “You couldn’t ascend even if a hole the size of a planet opened up above your heads,” she adds, condescendingly.

“I demand an explanation!” Rassilon yells. “Is it you? Have your presences interfered with the process?”

He means to come closer, probably reap the answers out of them somehow, but both the Doctor and the Master hold their ground, chins up, and say nothing as they wait for the rest of the Council to keep talking.

“If you do not tell me, child,” Rassilon threatens, “I will personally fling you off this roof as many times as it is necessary, and after our consciousnesses are gone from this planet, I will hunt you down in the fires to quench you dead again.”

“I thought you couldn’t return in any way once fully ascended in the next realm,” the Doctor says. “Isn’t that the point? Never dying, never changing. Eternal and away from the toils of other people?”

“Oh, yes…” Rassilon grumbles. “But I will make an example of you. You will make me the first impossible renaissance when I return to kill you, finally, after you have seen your precious universe perish to our ascension. And you _will_ see it perish.”

The Council chuckles in agreeance, but the Doctor continues to hold Rassilon’s gaze.

“Go on, then, Lord President,” she says. “Have it your way. See if you can get past me now and… ascend. But I don’t think you can. Because I am the presence in your heads, grounding you to this planet.”

Rassilon shouts at the Council to take their positions again, never minding her and her devious schemes, as she taunts them, and once more their pointless attempt to reach the stars as stardust fails when the Doctor quenches it like fire in her ashen hand.

“Fourteen lives I’ve had, mucking around in your plans, and you still haven’t learned in all these many years that what I do best, I never stop doing. Not even when you erase how to out of me.”

Rassilon chuckles nervously for a full minute, then, when silence seems to have taken hold of the terrace, he chuckles again, louder and louder every second.

“Next time, I will do better,” he says menacingly, beginning to approach her. “Trust me, Doctor…”

But it’s not her that his eyes fixate on.

Rassilon speaks the name of the Master. Softly, mysteriously, like a chanted spell in the depths of a nightmare, his voice speaks because the consciousness beneath knows it all.

Every last hair on the Master’s body stands at attention.

“What will you want in return?”

Not ‘do’, ‘will’. It implies a confirmation, a future for which the dice have already been cast without his knowledge, presence, or agreement, and the Master shivers before the President’s words, hearing in the back of his mind a whisper that tells him to surrender before it escalates, because fighting the President is futile, and fighting his own darkest whims… even more so.

“You always want something in return. Kill her, stop her, let us ascend…” Rassilon’s taunting him, almost pleading the way he would to a toddler with crayons in their hand about to Sistine-Chapel a blank wall. “And I am prepared to offer you everything you have ever wanted, child.”

Children of war, children of the Time Lords. That’s all they’ve ever been, Doctor and Master, Master and Doctor. And children must listen to their parents. Pity the Doctor was always such a rebel. But the Master will listen now. Because it’s high time the Council gave him his hearts’ desire.

“Come with us,” Rassilon says. “I shall name you a Council member and you may rise into the universe with us. Eternal forever, past the boundaries of thirteen deaths and lives. And were we to ever rupture into space and time as corporeal beings again, you would have it all, Master. The glory that was ripped from you, the power she robbed you of, the attention.” Rassilon smirks the most dangerous smirk, that of a person fully aware that he’s close to getting his way. “And with no responsibility to how you use it… whatsoever.”

If he closes his eyes, the months fly back, like leaves blown away by a wiser, kinder wind that knows best. His lives before, the lives without her, were lives of _misery_ that drawled on and on like time itself. Good, evil. The difference was peace of mind, minuscule and barely worth it, barely what he deserved in return for a choice. The difference had been whether he’d waited or decided he’d chase instead.

How easy it is now to remember, the dreams of his youth, the envies that had corroded him. Power, glory, community. Gallifrey’s promise, never once brought to him. He shed it all, because she showed him the better way would never be too out of reach if he ever chose it, if he ever decided their friendship could stand again. And he had made the decision. But the Doctor who held him, who forgave him, who believed throughout it all when he couldn’t, is no longer present in this Doctor. She will never know him now like she used to, not really. She will never fully love him the way he, in the most selfish parts of him, has tried to pretend he has never wanted her to. And now he can just… quit trying to believe. The easiest choice, the one he struggled with because belief gave him purpose and, however difficult that may be in a life as long as his own, purpose sometimes has saved him from wanting the wrong things.

Or… at least, from jumping straight at them.

Rassilon is offering death without death—the death he’s always sought and never achieved because once he’d finally reached his final death, he’d been given more life—, rest without consequence, and the chance to one day undo all of that and come back to start again, as a man of power. So many dreams. One choice.

Across him, the Doctor’s visibly about to crumble. Her legs won’t be holding her for much longer, her _head_ won’t be stalling the ascension for much longer. And the Master feels her terror as his own.

Doctor and Master. Master and Doctor.

He has to look away in shame.

However blurry her memories have been, corners have been suddenly thrust into a world so neat it dizzies her. She remembers this, exactly this, happening in the past. The Master turning on her. Her nightmares about years of alliance, destroyed at the turn of a second because of his poor decision-making. A primal fear, old as she is, pools in her stomach at the realization that it’s going to happen again, because nothing appeals to creatures like them like eternal rest together with the possibility of starting over with the power he’s always craved that she always kept from him.

“Think about it,” Rassilon says. “Not so long ago, you would not so much as have had to. You would have sold her for your very death.”

Rassilon’s chuckles echo in the Gallifrey sky like thunder about to split it in half.

But he is right. The Master knows it very well. Two lives ago, not even two and a half, he would have given her up if that meant he could finally _stop_ existing. Right now, he’s getting the better part of the deal. Because he’d also stop _worrying_ about her. Stop being a throwback little puppy that follows her around because she’s all he wishes he could be, because she’s all he wishes to be by the side of. And the liberation of that, even in hindsight, for the people that he’s been…

He should say yes. What is it to him, these people, this forsaken planet? This… Doctor who isn’t his Doctor, not really? He should say yes and embrace oblivion, embrace his origins, and let others deal with the damage after, true to his nature.

But his eyes stray to his friend’s face again. Lost and trembling as she is, he doesn’t—can’t—see the Doctor in her. He sees the face that feared the dark by his side. And he knows—he remembers it’s his duty to protect her. That’s why he’s there, why he decided to risk everything, his morals, in the first place by leaving Bristol to come back to Gallifrey. He realizes he can’t accept Rassilon’s offer, and why.

This is his test. So long after he first chose the opposite road of the one he’d walked since he left Gallifrey alone, he’s chosen to be good, to do good in the world, in his circle of life. This is how he proves it wasn’t all empty, when he has to give up something that might give him the peace he’s desperately sought and at times torn away from others. All along he has been wanting to genuinely be the person the Doctor had perceived in him before the mind wipe, a good person who tries his best. The person that he already _is._ Because, as the Doctor once said, being good doesn’t mean never getting it wrong, it means making an effort to get it a bit more right from then on.

In the end, the Master says nothing at all. He simply… reaches out for the Doctor’s hand to hold. She looks down at their joined hands in a confusion he will one day learn to forgive himself for, and in the glance they share, he makes an effort to get it right when he wordlessly reassures her of where he still stands.

“No?” Rassilon says. “Pity. You would have made the best council member. I did always think so.”

He quickly faces the Doctor now, her guard lowered and shaky. The neural web and the whirlwind of the past few minutes have taken their toll, and what she thought would last as a solid enough stance is now barely a standing pose.

“End it, Doctor,” he says, tired of the game even as he continues to play it. “You know you want to. End it, let it end. Let us go. And you’ll be free, here and elsewhere. I promise you, wherever this Council goes, you’ll never have to run away again.” His voice is soft, almost parent-like. “Before we leave, I can make sure that the commoners will accept you for what you are, I will name you a beloved child of Gallifrey. You will be loved, not just praised for the heroicness of ending a war most didn’t know you are even in” He even smiles. No one on Gallifrey, for thousands of years, has ever seen him smile. “And you can stay, for as long as you want, to do whatever you wish.”

Despite what is clearly empty promises, the Doctor hesitates. The daydream is wrapped around her deftly, his mind finally aware of her own in the neural web, casting shadows, solid shadows, to let her believe his make-believe truths and drive her himself out of the web if he has to.

The Master hears it. The lies he couldn’t detect when it was his turn until it was too late. He’s offering her what she most desires and never lets herself even dream about. And because of that, because the Doctor dreams and keeps quiet, now the final moment falls to Gallifrey’s greatest hero and the man who ruined it first. He cannot let her do it alone.

“Yeah, she can stay, can’t she?” he interrupts. “For as long as the shock wave from your ascension doesn’t kill us all, so not very long.”

Taken by surprise, it’s a few seconds more until Rassilon addresses the Doctor again, ignoring the Master, with a new proposal.

“I will even give you time to evacuate, if that’s what you desire. You can be ruler of a new Gallifrey, born from the ashes of this one…”

_Three Gallifreys…_

She never even meant to lose the first one. Or rule it. or own it. She had just wanted to leave and come back one day, knowing it’d be safe to, for her and everybody else.

But Gallifrey burned. It’s not burning again.

If she let the Council go now, ascend away, she could save Gallifrey and not lose a single life in the process. Then, she could figure out a way to trap the Council’s souls, minds, presences otherwise so the rest of the universe would never succumb to the destruction the rupture of their ascension would bring.

Sensing hesitance in her, the Master tries to get hold of her, to look her in the eye, but she’s not responding. She must be lost in the infinity of her own head, pondering, weighing… But he refuses to believe all is hopeless.

“Doctor…” he calls for her, his voice so tinged with the hurry of desperation. “Doctor, it’s not worth it. A whole planet? For the entire universe? You’d never make that exchange. Never. Not even now. You _didn’t_.”

And then, finally, her eyes focus on his. In a slow procession of time that stretches on and on, the two of them exist alone, drenched in one thought, one concept that wraps around them like the warmth of two suns. Without noise or other stimuli, the thought grows large, and by the time the moment ends, the Master nods succinctly at her. He understands, and he trusts her with this, and she him.

The platform on the floor lifts up with Gat standing on it. Every last person on the terrace stares at her quietly emerge from the opening, her ponytail a bit undone from the sweat and motion of a crazy day, fine hairs flying free in the wind against her temples.

Those who have been around her long enough know her just as the engineer. The Doctor takes a moment to look at her, really look at her, and is pleased to find that characteristic sneer in her face, barely managing to contain how pissed off she truly is as she walks forward, a heavy-looking remote in her hand.

Separated a few feet away from the Doctor and the Master, she lifts her head up to meet the Council’s impatient eyes.

“You called?” she says placidly.

Rassilon doesn’t waste time in hissing out his orders for her to figure out a way to disrupt whatever the Doctor’s doing to keep him from ascending. He spares her no detail, which he’d always been careful about before.

“I do not care if you have to knock her out and cut her head open,” he finishes. “Do it.”

But Gat does not move a muscle.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Rassilon asks rudely.

It is then, and not before, that Gat’s previously tense but measured behavior transforms when she stands tall in her petiteness. She defiantly dares to glare at the Council, she bares her teeth at them.

“This,” she says, holding the remote tighter in her hands, wiggling it a little for them to see, “has a recording of everything that has been said here. Every… last… little thing. It will connect with every household, every mind in it.”

The gasp comes too late. She’s already pressed the button to activate it.

“The whole of Gallifrey will know, my lords, that you’re trapped on top of a dome with no chance of getting out. And that you’ve bargained with their lives.”

Someone in the Council still has the nerve to laugh.

“ _The whole of Gallifrey_ is being massacred by the Daleks,” they say.

Gat smirks at them, then turns back at the platform lift.

“I wouldn’t be so sure…” she says, right as it comes back up with a few of her team of renegades, armed and ready. They take positions behind the Doctor, the Master and Gat. It quickly becomes apparent that there is a gun pointed at every last member of the Council, including the President. Someone tosses Gat a weapon; she catches it with one hand and aims it at Rassilon as well. “ _These_ are specifically altered to sap out regeneration energy as the projectile kills you. So I wouldn’t try anything.”

The images, the audio… comes crashing into all of their minds. Flashes of truth that some, down in the towns, will wish they’d never seen in the first place. By the time they’ve faded, Rassilon’s face muddled with horror the very last frame of it, the Doctor has taken a step towards the old president.

“It’s over,” she says gently.

“No…” he growls.

“The entire planet knows, Rassilon,” Gat says. “Do you know what they’ll do? Do you know what they’re _already_ doing?”

The platform lift comes back up again. More people with guns flood the terrace silently, their bodies holding on to ancient rage.

“Even the Daleks will know,” the Master adds.

Gat points at the skies beneath the terrace.

“Not that the Daleks are in any condition to mind…”

The confused members of a Council that barely has hours left as such dare to leave their positions on the circle and take a look below, at the saucers slowly coming down to crash on buildings, grounds, domes, at the thousands of Daleks plummeting down because they are no longer in control of their own bodies. Some create explosions as they fall on solid ground. The smoke reaches a tenth of the height of the tower of the terrace.

The Daleks’ cries reach them poorly, but their echo is unmistakable. For the first time in a long time, everyone welcomes their peculiar elocution.

“Help! Heeeeeeelp! Help… me!”

Somehow, today, those robotic, emotionless voices of them sound slightly less so.

Rassilon walks to the main three in a fury, gauntlet at the ready. One of Gat’s team renegades points a gun at him, prepared to be shot his way. The president barely stops for a second to realize, then keeps on shortening the distance between them until a shot hits the air. The floor immediately before him stands charred and smoking.

“Your own president! Treason!” he blabbers out.

“Little late to grasping that, are we?” the Master jokes.

Gat actually snorts in amusement.

Rassilon turns around to his Council.

“You all saw! This is treason, you will rot in—”

The Doctor sighs in exhaustion.

“Look around you, Rassilon,” Doctor says. Her words, slightly below her normal tone, are not a consequence of feeling kindness for him, or compassion. They are another sign of how truly demanding it is to hold the Council into the neural web, in place.

She should still keep the web linked to her, just in case. But it’s over now. It is. None of these people will let Rassilon raise his hands back to the sky. From the lift, more renegades keep coming, all coming from different jobs, places, lives. And… below, barely dots from so high up, people. People leaving the domes and the towns, marching out on top of buildings, into the streets, everywhere, screaming out the meaning of freedom, making it theirs. The people have taken Gallifrey after an entire history of being subjugated to the Council and the Time Lord tyranny.

It’s the start of a new era in many more ways than one.

“Gallifrey belongs, for the first time in its long history, to the Gallifreyans.”

* * *

Times change under the rule of choice.

Against the judgment of his own kind, and the raw hatred of his so-called superiors, the Master puts forward the foundations on what everything else will be built from then on. A choice.

The Council is disbanded, but their previous members are permitted one last choice. Either to repent and grow as parts of a new community that will rebuild the ruins or be banished without any available time- or space-travel methods, their life cycles frozen back to the current life they’re on in the standard of thirteen regenerations. Many take the latter, but not all.

When Rassilon expresses his desire to abandon the planet, he’s made to leave his gauntlet behind, and the item is taken on a secluded wing in one of the many corners of the Citadel where war relics are kept mainly for research purposes.

All around the planet, some nobles and those accustomed to the ways of and their own loyalty to the Council choose to follow them on their voluntary exile, free to return, unlike the Council themselves. A great majority of citizens, however, stays.

Together, the communities rise to have the Dalek fleet teleported out of the skies, helped out of their limited mobility, and warned to think twice before crossing this corner of the universe again. They do so as the Citadel’s protective shields are taken down, which only reinforces the unspoken threat to Gallifrey’s first enemy. The Daleks know now that the Time Lords have no need for protection, since their weapons are far more subtle. Yet the Gallifreyans are not after a war. If an attack came upon them again, no shields would rise first but that of diplomacy and cunning words, and if it ever was necessary to join a battle, they would do so as one force without elites.

It is exactly in that new-found union that they organize, in the newest, safest chaos, so that no family is left unaided, no building unreformed, no post left vacant. Armorers learn the subtleties of education, educators learn the finesse of tailors, tailors pick up the skills of an astronomer. And little by little their society grows beyond the constraints of the past by teaching one another how to be there for their neighbor in the future. Representatives are decided upon as their new type of self-government, when almost ever mind interconnected in the planet understands the hundreds it is in contact with. Every town and city will name their representatives to come to in times of need, to guide the community in organizing the most troublesome situations that arise in daily life, and offer them the comfort of a figure to come to. No one anywhere will be above another. In case of conflict between two towns or cities, there will be no higher government to appeal to. There will be no power to uphold, no power to aspire to. Only the work of people with people for people. And a rotating vote every few years to let the community choose, to let the chosen ones rest, and new ideas flow.

And, with time, perhaps Gallifrey will heal enough to become a planet of explorers, of time travelers, of truce-makers, and return responsibly to the origins of the race that once began it all.

Everyone contributes to the dream in their own unique ways. Despite what the engineers as a whole turn to, happy to participate in grand repairs in the TARDIS port or to fabricate missing pieces of machinery that are needed elsewhere in the planet, Gat stays in her workshop, now emptier than she ever remembers it being. At first, she too puts together absurd amounts of technological work in order to re-erect destroyed homes and community buildings, resting little and eating less, but as the damage of too many lifetimes slowly patches itself up with effort, she finds that there is joy to be found in the _mapping out_ of those reforms. Archways, corridors, chapels, bedrooms, baths. Gat becomes something of an architect, and in her hearts, something fits right where it always should have. Revolutions are not, after all, just blowing things up and losing interest after the smoke’s cleared. The best part of a revolution is getting to put love in the restoring, in the caring of each other. In the end, gentle beginnings pave the road to kinder societies.

Fleeing from the ghost and atemporal echoes of the Citadel, the Master, too, finds solace in the work that follows the climax of victory. He settles in small towns, uses names nobody knows him for here, and offers to fill in for those tasks that others have semi-abandoned in the fleeting frenetic days of. Mostly, and to his surprise, that entails tending crops, one of the few skills he actually cultivated in his time. In his words to the Doctor when he’s already returned to the Citadel, years later, there is honor in contributing in small ways to a community that needs it. After all, there’s already very good technicians on the job, nobody is looking for another one, least of all in the desert where many have already volunteered to travel and help.

The Doctor, however, resides in the Citadel throughout the entire reconstruction of Gallifrey, even if she comes and goes like the day and the night, flying her TARDIS to where rumors say there’s trouble, or need, or quite simply something interesting. The years it all spans feel indefinite to her, trapped between two landing spots and a blue box that enlarges everything it touches. She boomerangs between towns carved in canyons where the scarce water of Gallifrey’s lost rivers pools between timeless rock; rescuing the last of the Daleks from the rumble it caused when it fell, setting it to take off far and away with the warning that should its kind—or anyone else, for that matter—return with a war provocation, all they will meet on Gallifreyan soil will be the soft annihilation she just saved this one unit from. The Dalek is smart enough to understand what that might mean if it’s coming from _the Doctor._ In front of people, though, she puts on her bubbly face. She cooks meals for new friends, she lifts wooden beams into their original spots, she stands by as conflicts resolve with her help and her distance, both. The lack of quiet, the presumption that every second requires her to be doing something new somewhere else, is a gift she accepts warily. Aware that she hasn’t had the time to sit with her feelings, to own them, and focus on herself, the Doctor acknowledges that perhaps she might have sought this restlessness as her motivation to run further away from it all. She keeps seeking it; there are things far more important than her now.

One day, back in the Citadel, some of Gat’s old friends who first organized this chaos that slowly seems to resemble a society of sorts stop her on the way to the TARDIS port. Their faces bear the mark of slight exhaustion and the tiny spark of happiness that still gets them going, and the Doctor regards them kindly, forgetting her hurry and her sullen thoughts.

“What can I do for you?”

The two of them share a quick glance.

“Actually,” one says. “Far more than you’re expecting.”

“You’ve been proposed as one of the Citadel’s representatives,” the other explains.

The Doctor takes a moment to assimilate it.

“By whom? I thought people had to vote on that, I thought everyone counted as candidates.”

“They will, they _do_ —it’s not in place yet. A lot of people live here. _But_ some of the old gang, Gat’s gang, we thought… well, we thought since we’re all already sort of representatives of a kind…”

“It was agreed that _you_ should be the first official representative when the time comes.”

“Gat insisted.”

A moment is not enough. A hundred explanations would not be enough for the Doctor to _process_ what’s being asked of her. No, not even asked. She’s being offered the possibility of being appointed right now, of setting an example in times when everyone needs one, of becoming more than a war hero to praise distantly, more than a legend from older times. She could _shape_ this world, the way she used to dream when she was a child. But she’d have to do it by agreeing to _skip_ the most important rule set after the Council. Is that price good enough for her?

These years, she’s gotten more pieces of herself back, most of which fit into the eternal puzzle that is her history without making her doubt twice. Pieces that are hers, unquestionably so. She knows how many rules she has broken and on the behalf of who and what. And she doesn’t like who she has been, contrasted with the memories she has of before the mind wipe. But she does like the life she led then, free to roam, ready to help out. And she likes the idea of being that person far, far more than she likes the idea of becoming the ruler she dreamed of being when she was eight.

_I know who I want to be._ She smiles slyly to herself. _Finally._

“I don’t think it’d be for me. So many of you could do it so much better,” she replies. “Plus… Places to go.”

She points at the corridor where she disappears afterwards, leaving behind two very confused people who probably did not expect her to refuse because, in all honesty, so many parts of her didn’t, either.

Now, after so long and so much lost hope, Gallifrey is everything but a graveyard, but a battlefield. She’s not turning it into her own personal reign, either.

* * *

He’s never really left. Years he has spent making the skin of the ground sing flowers out of its pores, but at the end of every long day, he still found himself wandering back. To a tiny room in the abandoned areas of a Citadel that thrives, where the Doctor was never waiting, yet where she always returned when her duties were over, as well. He’s stopped counting the days that have passed since the last time any one of them flew away.

When he slid into the room, his farming years over, the Doctor was still taking the TARDIS out from time to time. He was never sure if to help where she’d heard there was trouble or to escape the tight spaces of a history that hadn’t lost its blurriness. She’d traveled less and less until the TARDIS had become another ghost in the port, together with his own, ever since she told him about the job offer and its terrible timing.

In this room they share, out of a silent and common decision, more than physical space has come to be shared, confidences that not that long ago he would have had to wait for, to leave a trail of truths for her to follow until she’d been ready to trust him with them. Occasionally, he wonders if it would cheer her out of one of her lonesome weeks to hear him say out loud that he has fully accepted she will never be able to regain all the memories she lost and become the Doctor he remembers and misses. Most of the time, he prefers not to say a word, aware that her awkwardness might grow to be too much for her. She _knows_ there’s many little pieces still left to fit back into her mind, she knows they might never do so; she accepts it. He has offered once or twice, in quiet, careful mutters, if she’d feel better by stepping into his TARDIS to try his matrix again. Her reply was always a short smile as she shook her head. It wouldn’t be enough for her to gain those memories as distant flashes of a past she can’t recognize, and they’ve both grown to move past that.

After all, there is more to life than memories.

Their room used to require special authorization to enter, way back in the days when underground storage occupied space in piles instead of tidy lines of boxes or items. Now, it’s a box all on its own, walls rusty and smelly with the passage of time and the humidity of nearby buildings. Empty, except for a fabricated desk and a chair that looks like it might crumble into ash any second, two bunks that were not originally intended to be modified to fit beds that yet do have two old thin mattresses reigning supreme over them now.

The Master insisted on having a surface vaguely resembling a bed for the both of them, heavily and borderline annoying as he went on about them ‘needing sleep’, especially him, for some reason. So the Doctor claimed the lower bunk, close enough to the floor that whenever she sleeps, her hand inevitably ends up on it, so that at least she could get away quicker than him.

She was, of course, right in assuming they’d sleep little. Even he, with two Time Lord hearts beating in his chest, who allegedly needs a few hours a night.

Lately, Gallifrey’s quiet as the whole planet prepares to vote, town by town, city by city, for those who everyone wants to guide them out into the future. With nothing much to do, they’ve sequestered themselves to the anonymous life on the Citadel, where the nights do not have to be lonely in the buoyant activity that crosses every area of it but are.

The Master can’t sleep. He keeps dreaming of the wrong choices, waking up sweaty when he realizes he was too close to making them. Sometimes, not even the sight of the Doctor sleeping soundly (despite all her ranting about how little she needs to) manages to sweep the feeling off him, and he goes out to the desert for a walk. But tonight when the dream returns him to the silence, the torturously static silence, of the room, the Master doesn’t leave, doesn’t move. He lays there and thinks.

_Funny,_ he tells himself, a hint of humor in the thoughts that accompany and swirl around the words. _She doesn’t know who she was, and she’s learned not to care. But do I even know who I am now? Have I ever truly known? Or was it all just lies?_

“I know you’re awake, I can hear you breathing…” she says from below his bunk, rolling over with a sigh. “What’s on your mind?”

He can’t sleep, and she won’t. Truly, spectacularly funny. She’s so stubborn, he could never so much as talk her into the benefits of sleep versus the toils of staying up to talk to a friend.

Lengthening it as much as he can, the Master reciprocates her sigh as he turns on his mattress so his voice will project better.

“Don’t you ever feel… nameless?” he says.

“I haven’t used my real name with anyone other than… at most three people in the past years, so… yes.” She seems to realize the reason he might be asking and mutters carefully: “Are _you_ feeling nameless?”

He snorts, tired. “No one has used _my_ name for real since you.”

“Which me?” she asks casually. It’s a measure of her healing that she can say that.

“Academy you. Young you.” He shakes his head, getting lost in his own thoughts again. “You know what I mean. Since our academy days. Since you left… or I left, I suppose.”

She seems to ponder about what he’s said for a minute.

“But you’re not nameless,” she says. “I seem to recall you did choose your current name very enthusiastically.”

“I did. And how long ago do you think it stopped meaning what it used to?” His tone is soft, he is never sure what she remembers and what she doesn’t.

But by the way she looks at him… she must remember the version of him who’d already confessed to a partial namelessness with her and… she must not have forgotten what he’d told her, the day he’d first called himself the Master to her in a way that perfectly defined what that name had always meant as a nickname, all the years prior, and what it would forever stand for from then on.

“Younger you would be terribly pleased to hear this,” she says, her tone that of an excited teenager during the muttered secrets shared at sleepovers, “but you’ll always be the Master to me.”

He chuckles. “And how many years later has that confession come, d’you think?”

“Shut up, I mean it,” she grumbles adorably. “Maybe it’s habit, maybe it’s something else… but it’s true. You don’t choose a name like that, let it stick and then—”

“Ditch it away? I could. I could be John Smith.”

“I was John Smith first!”

“Well, I call dibs on it now.”

They laugh softly, quietly at the throwback memory that belongs to them both, that she never lost, and that now joins them at the end of everything.

“In all seriousness, though…” she says. “You can keep it, just… let it mean something else to you, something that younger you wouldn’t have foreseen.”

He humors her.

“Like what?” Softly, softly, he speaks with the sort of interest and happiness that pours out of him when he realizes that she’s back to engaging in this like they’re still teens.

“What’s a master? Someone that’s the best at something, right?” He can hear in her voice that she’s already building on to something that’s snowballing quickly in her head, much too quickly, if it involves him in this manner he’s not even sure he deserves in any way, after everything. “You’re good at stubbornness, you’re good at mechanics, apparently—” She giggles to herself again. “—or we wouldn’t be here.” Her normal tone returns not much after to explain what she means, beyond all her struggle for words that convey it well enough. “You’re good at this. The best. You can be the Master of that.”

He sighs a long sigh that echoes in the emptiness of the room.

“Better be Jack at this point,” he mumbles. “Jack of all trades, master of none…”

“I mean it.”

“So do I,” he replies calmly. “The only thing I was ever the master of is something I’m not proud of. Something I…”

He doesn’t have to say it, they both know. Something he almost went back to because of an empty promise and some manipulation on Rassilon’s part. Some stupid almost-choice. Why does it keep happening to him? Will he keep dreaming of the evil path forever, now that his tests have supposedly come and gone? He wonders briefly if those dreams will ever truly end. If they’re supposed to.

The Doctor’s quiet and thoughtful for a long time, so much so that he could practically read her thoughts out of the rhythm of her breaths, the rustle of her against the mattress.

“Well,” she finally says slowly, gently, “you mastered the art of me.”

“That doesn’t sound half as nice as you think it does,” he says, amused at a sort of innuendo she can’t even pinpoint clearly. However, he’s honest when he tells her, much, much more quietly: “But thank you.”

“I would never have found out about the truth without you,” she insists. “And I would never have followed you in the first place, if you hadn’t known me as masterfully as you’ve proven you do, if you hadn’t paced everything you said to me. That’s what made me trust you. That, despite everything I thought I knew… you knew _more_. And it wasn’t all lies.”

It is an enormous confession, what she has just said. Time ago, in the TARDIS, when asked, the Doctor had assured him that nothing had prompted her to trust him. Despite her memory issues, and the late hour, and how exhausted everything has made them for years, he figures it might be time to confess something _back_ , too. Something she already knows but might have forgotten, one way or the other.

“Well, if anything, Doctor, I was able to do all that because you have taught me—both intentionally and unaware, I suppose—how to be a person half worth following. And because I once knew to believe in you enough to listen, even when I didn’t want to believe in what you said.”

* * *

The new murals manage to surprise her like none of the old artwork ever has. Perhaps it’s the actual history of it, with people up on ladders, brush on hand, to draw the days of Gallifrey’s ascension. History in construction, decisions still being contemplated over long meals and the light of the stars. Everywhere she walks in the old Citadel, murals are being painted, ceilings studied in search for new space to pain some more. Walls, columns, storage chambers. Everywhere, a gentle, ecstatic buzzing of life follows. The Doctor breathes through it, unsure of how much of it she’s getting to share at all. Sometimes her own smile betrays her. Sometimes it’s the golden words of her people, discreet among the paintings. History, after all, requires the telling of a story in order to be _shared._

By a statue in a long hallway, an old friend waits, arms crossed, foot on the wall. The Doctor hasn’t seen her around the Citadel in very, very long, but she has heard whispers, here and there, of where she might have gone and what she might be doing. She wasn’t expecting Gat to ask her to meet like this, least of all here.

“It’s been a long time,” the Doctor says.

Gat nods a couple of times.

“These things take time,” she teases. “You’ve been around humans for too long, you’ve forgotten.”

Her smirk fades when her words do.

The Doctor doesn’t know where to begin. She doesn’t know if questions are in order now.

“What have you been up to?” she asks.

“Better deals than those I took when I was still living here.”

“So you’ve truly left the Citadel…” The Doctor smiles.

Gat smiles an honest smile, the furthest thing from sarcasm—a rare feat for her, in the Doctor’s opinion.

“Is there anything you need help with, now that you’re back?” the Doctor asks almost in a whisper, eyes darting across the hallway to make sure those passing by are not paying attention to them.

It feels, for a second, exactly like the old times, spent entirely in preparation for something sinister, always in the shadows so they wouldn’t be caught red-handed too early.

The smirk wrinkles itself into a sad half-smile and Gat, once head engineer, once traitor to the cause that landed her there, shakes her head slowly.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think, since we last saw each other,” Gat says. She makes eye-contact with the Doctor for what she says next and that speaks volumes about her, since few people could or would: “And I’ve come to apologize to you.”

“Me?” the Doctor says, confused.

“For my part in taking your memories from you and going after you and your friends,” Gat explains. “Ridiculous as it sounds, once I did think it would take Gallifrey somewhere.”

The Doctor softens inside. Gat did tell her, back then, about her reasons for believing such a thing. An apology was never necessary; it isn’t now, either. But having it reminds her how much good there’s still in a world where evil was bred, and nurtured, and fed back into the soil daily.

“You’ve got nothing to apologize to me for, Gat,” she replies softly. “We’ve all done terrible things for the right causes. And you’ve actually made the right thing happen for the right cause, not long afterward. That honors you _and_ your decisions.”

“I know,” Gat says, shrugging. “I still wanted to say it to you. I figured…” She pauses in search for a better way to phrase it. “I figured I owed you. If anything, you’d have that… Closure can be a pain to reach.”

The Doctor frowns. She can see that Gat’s not done talking.

“So, if you’re willing, since I’ll be in the Citadel for some time, you could walk back into the Matrix Chamber,” Gat says slowly, unsure. “With me working it, you’d be able to get all you lost back at once. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it _would_ be instantaneous, and it’d be… like adding up to a timeline, not splitting it, not cutting pieces of it out to fit new ones in.”

And apology and a final solution to the impossible problem.

She should say yes and have Gat fix it, like she fixed everything else when no one was even looking. If she valued herself as much as she always has the worlds around her, she might. But the Doctor’s full of remembrance. Her own memory flashes back at her in pieces and cuts and knots she has to manually input in what she believes to be the right spots, but more and more often now, those pieces feel like _hers_ , and the voids in her hearts, in her mind, clear up quicker, after. Pieces like a yellow room in the heart of a TARDIS, a library with white walls and an assistant called Janet that saw a future in people’s eyes, a changing room in a city called Bristol where there were piles of unbought clothes…

Pieces like the day when the Master, she and Clara traveled to a giant meadow of orange flowers whose pollen was nonallergenic to humans, and a Nakuh (local cave dweller clawed beast from the less meadowy continents) quite simply popped up and charged at them, forcing them to scatter like little ants. They’d ended up breathless and wet from the accumulated dew on the plants, practically hysterical after Clara had tried to scream at the Nakuh and the Master had tried to be diplomatic to the creature, while the Doctor had been first in line running once she’d recognized the species. After all, she and Clara had had to stop a Nakuh invasion attempt in southern Europe once before. With rather nasty results both for a few of the humans involved and the Nakuh Leader.

Now, the Doctor doesn’t think forcing herself through what Gat’s offering would help but blur up every last memory she has gotten back on her own with distant flashes she cannot recognize until time returns them to her itself.

“Thank you, Gat,” the Doctor says, gently, and lies: “But I’m fine.”

With a polite nod, she abandons the hallway to return to the desert, to the narrow streets that miles later lead to scarce buildings that barely reach a few feet off the ground. She pushes the door to the place she might as well call home lately, and finds the Master reading on the chair, some glasses she’s never seen in her lives on his nose, his feet on the desk.

He glances at her when she comes in, removing her black jacket and tossing it on her bed before she snoops over his shoulders.

“What’s that?” she asks, balancing herself on her toes.

“A… book,” he says.

“What a complicated mind, yours,” she teases. “What’s it _about_?”

“I stole it from you, so… uh…” he says, closing it, a finger pressed between the pages, and lifting it up for her to see. “Little women, doing things.”

“ _You_ are reading _Little Women_?”

He sighs an academic sigh. “I particularly relate to Laurie.”

“I particularly relate to Jo,” she says, her face the solidity of cement.

“Figures.”

“Give me that…”

She snatches the book out of his hands and softly smacks his left shoulder with it before throwing it onto her mattress, where her jacket’s landed and begun to get wrinkly already.

The Master manages to swivel in a desk chair without wheels. He puts his feet—his _shoes_ —on it as well now that they’re not facing the desk.

“How was it?” he asks. “With Gat?”

She hesitates for a moment. He shows his interest in her life this way, her response should be appropriate to it, displaying the same amount of interest back and trusting him enough to not hold back. All this time, despite the sudden flashes in her that call for concern, he has never done anything to make her regret staying here with him.

So she tells him everything in short, agitated words that mean to sound everything but, and he listens, paying amounts of attention that should not be able to fit inside such a small room. Not once does he speak up to interrupt, or to ask impertinent questions. He lets her finish.

He waits, even until she’s widely gestured away the anxiety in her chest and gone sit down on her mattress, practically on the floor. He waits a little longer to suggest what she once declined. But things have changed. They share a room, a fate, a purpose. Maybe it’s time for him to ask again.

“Would you… would you consider letting me show you some of the memories I shared with you?” he asks. “If you want them, I mean. It wouldn’t be like you lived them, obviously, since they’re mine, but… it won’t hurt, and it won’t be disconcerting to watch your own point of view without recognizing it, I don’t think.”

She stares at him in silence for a while.

“What?” he says quietly.

But she can’t reply immediately. Because things _have_ changed, and the holes in her mind are tiny enough that the lack of whatever they used to hold bothers her, because it’s the last lost pieces of a giant puzzle she thought she had all figured out. She has the bigger picture, she’s had that for some time, but what about the little parts that make it make sense, that frame it?

“What do you have in mind?” she asks—her way to agree.

“What do you remember less about?”

She gulps before she answers, eyes looking at the floor.

“The end…”

The Master rises from the chair with the prudence that has never characterized him before. His joints creak a little as he does, and as he goes sit on her mattress, right by her side, their legs touching, their faces almost mirrors of each other. Then, gently, he lets his fingers climb up all the way to her temples, and it begins before she can look him in the eye.

Perhaps he should have taken some time to choose the memory. Perhaps it is rash to settle this quickly over something this important. But the very second he accesses it, his doubts become a pinch of salt in an ocean of water. He’s chosen it because it’s recent, because it’s the closest he could find to who she was, when no one cared to ask her to be anyone in particular, before the Council’s Matrix erased her from herself.

In a theater, somehow, there had only been _two._ Two, and four hearts. And a song that ended right into another, a song within a song. Time in music. The Master had watched the Doctor waddle away to ask for more of it, more and more and more, and after dancing like they’d used to, like they never had before in their youth, he’d let himself _wonder_ and his eyes _wander_ over a Time Lord in a tux and a scarf who managed to come off as wonderfully alien even when asking a DJ for a secret song, hands gesturing in the air, her face moving with the rest of her so that no word was left a blank space. Then, and quite suddenly, too, the Doctor had turned back to him with a grin as beautiful as every nebula, and rock had thundered in the Master’s chest. In the entire theater, and yet somehow only, mostly, in his hearts.

Never, in over two thousand years, has one thing been clearer to the Doctor. She has heard the words, she has tried to negate them, tried to rationalize them, understand them, even. This memory, the layers of it that are _new_ to her, have shown her an objectivity in his experience of it that shock her profoundly.

Still, now, the Doctor does the only thing she can after such a revelation. She chuckles. Like the rustle of a thin waterfall, she chuckles, and lets that be the curtain of silence being drawn.

“So…” she says, trying her best to sound humorous. “You do love me.”

Despite her tone, the Master blinks in surprise at her wording and makes a herculean effort not to joke back at her because he knows very well that they aren’t _just joking_ anymore.

“…yes,” he says.

In fact, when she speaks again, she is not joking anymore either.

“Since when?”

“Well, we were eight, so… civilizations have risen and fallen,” he says, a little harsher than intended. But, after all, he has intended it a great many ways before actually saying it. To make up for his tone, he tries to chuckle, too. “I’d dare say that’s a pretty darn long time, wouldn’t you?”

The Doctor says nothing, just looks at him, and he can’t possibly fathom right now in what way.

“What made you change your mind?” he asks instead. “About believing me.”

“You didn’t tell me this time. I just… saw,” she replies, softly. “You used to look at me like that, too. Before.”

Before… What an accomplishment for language, to have created a word that can fit eternities, childhoods, lives, and falls, into six letters.

“I’ve never actually told you much,” he says, smiling to himself. Neither of them _are_ looking at each other now. “Believe it or not, it took some time until I figured it out myself.”

And all the time in the world, in his hearts, until he’d fully accepted what that meant. Until he’d known how to deal with it in ways that didn’t jeopardize lives, including her own.

The Doctor takes a sharp breath next to him.

“I’ve always wished I could look at you… the way you were looking at me. That day. In that memory,” she confesses, her voice smaller than normal, almost but not quite soft. “I always wished I knew how. I figured… maybe it would fix us.”

The Master takes her hand in his. She squeezes at his fingers.

“You do something _better_. You keep coming for me, you keep letting me come back. I think I prefer that,” he says. “You’d be one hell of a terrible lover.” He smiles right into her eyes, as she lowers her gaze into his, no longer fearful to acknowledge the bond that neither wars nor time managed to dissolve. “You’d always miss all the anniversaries in the most chaotic chronological order.”

She laughs like a child, unafraid. “You’d be a pretty shitty lover, too. But… who knew, huh? That after everything we’d still be here, together. Two idiots in a box.”

He looks up at the bunk, at the ceiling that hangs low on them.

“Yeah, we really should do something about that, shouldn’t we?”

* * *

The first few hills, he rambles on and on like the eight-year-old she never forgot. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to _the Master_ quoting Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare back to her. Him, the eternal Earth despiser.

_Wise men at their end know dark is right because their words had forked no lightning._

_Wild men caught and sang the sun in flight and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way._

He actually points at the suns when he quotes that last one, and she laughs at him. A little. Her sun, lost and grieved, burned within and was forcefully sent out into the unknown. She’s learned since how to live without it, and life has granted her some sunrays back. Every time she sleeps, everything she does, every moment by the Master’s side, a new memory arrives. Hers, quietly so.

_I wasted time, and now doth time waste me._

_We are time’s subjects, and time bids begone._

Instead of scoffing to complain, the Doctor passes him on the ascent to the tallest hill around the Citadel and lets him hear a chorus of chuckles as she does. She puts her hands on her hips, standing still, so much smaller than the city that watched her grow up and on a hill she probably climbed more than once. Such a giant city, so lonely, then. Even now, with people filling it more and better than before, the distance puts its inherent loneliness into perspective. Out in the desert, on the hills, their home, watching the Citadel be drowned in the sea of clouds, lose its impressing might without sound, gives it a shakier temperament.

Today, at least, the skies are not all white framing the rising suns. The day has dawned peachy and pearly, contrasting with the rust of the sand and the metal of the buildings. The Doctor hears the Master finally reach the top, huffing his lungs out, and she laughs again as he comes stand next to her before a peaceful, silent Gallifrey.

Then, out of nowhere, she misses a breath. One, two. And the planet’s turn tickles, and the sun’s heat falls down as warmth, and she feels herself almost crying.

_I know who I am…_

The Master notices the flash of recognition in her, the first tears forming in her eyes, and he _knows_ without needing to ask, without being given a hint and without having a sign. He knows like he knows they climbed this very hill side by side, many, many years ago.

But now the past is the last thing on his mind. Funnily enough.

He raises a shaky hand, afraid to touch her after so much animosity, however simulated, and brushes the ends of her hair, so light against his knuckles. He’s still afraid to have hope.

She lets out a breath through her nose and smiles a small, contained smile his way, holding back tears that are already shining on the corners of her eyes.

“Hi,” she simply says.

“Hi, sweetheart. Welcome back.”

His hand cups around her cheek.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look very nice when you’re focusing on something you think you can’t understand?” she asks, cheeky, leaning onto his palm and covering it with her own. Her other hand—her right—squeezes his left-hand fingers.

He clears his throat, leans towards her.

“And what can’t I understand?” he asks softly.

Her expression softens. Her eyes sparkle with the unsaid words.

“In spite of all of this,” she replies matter-of-factly, “you still don’t believe it’ll always be you and me.”

That’s his promise to her, and hers to him. He gets it now. _Focusing on something I think I can’t understand._ But he does understand it. And he is focusing on it. He always has.

It’s right in front of him, how could he not?

“I have the now. I don’t need to believe in timeless promises anymore.” Unbelievable as it may sound, he still says it, because it’s true. “Being here, like this, that’s enough for me. It has been for a while.”

She puts her arms around him and buries her face on his shoulder, wrapping him in a hug, because she _knows_ what he’s been through after all the ambivalence. And because… because she’s missed knowing him this well everywhere. Memories, mind, hearts.

“Still,” she whispers, eyes closed.

Then, he breaks it off, discreetly brushing off tears, and he faces the horizon, the city, and the suns, hands behind his back.

“They’ll be announcing it now…”

The Citadel’s board of representatives. Gallifrey has been waiting a while for this one, practically everywhere else has had their own settled by now.

“Do you want to go back?” she says, endlessly holding back on amused excitement.

He turns back towards her, just to make sure he’s heard right past her words into what she’s truly saying. Her face does not betray her tone. It’s implicit, then, that maybe it’s time to move on from their home planet once more, except… this time, they’ll do it together, no question. And she’s _asking_ , she hardly ever asked. Where she went, he followed.

He still will. Always. As long as she hopes to find him there.

Because now she’s back to herself, and this planet has been too small for them both for quite some time. They can come back, yes, they can come back. One day. Now, there’s so much… so much promised. To be promised.

In the end, he asks the only thing he can:

“Where shall we go?”

The Doctor understands at once, so she chuckles, offers him her arm to take. He takes it elegantly and they begin walking down the hill, heading in the distance for the TARDIS in the port, in the vast immensity of the Citadel.

“Oldest answer in the _u_ niverse,” she says to him animatedly. Then, her tone shifts, becomes placid and heavy with old memories: “To the stars.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Wise men at their end know dark is right because their words had forked no lightning.” Quote from Dylan Thomas’s poem _Do not go gentle into that good night_ , referenced by Clara Oswald in series 9.
> 
> “Wild men caught and sang the sun in flight and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way.” Paraphrase from Dylan Thomas’s poem _Do not go gentle into that good night_. The original is: “Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight / And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way."
> 
> “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Shakespeare’s _Richard II_.
> 
> “We are time’s subjects, and time bids begone.” Shakespeare’s _Henry IV_.
> 
> It’s already canon that the Doctor _knows_ Shakespeare, idk, I thought it might be cute for the Master to as well. He’d already shown interest earlier, but since the Doctor’s a bit of a nerd, I imagine he’d willingly try and learn things she likes (mostly so she’ll think he’s impressive XD).


	6. And yet my home is still someplace, someone else

_Bristol, 2020._

“Where’s the frying pan?”

“What?”

“The frying pan!”

“What??”

“Heather, honestly, just pop your head out of the bedroom.”

Heather steps loudly on the floor. On purpose. Her face is entirely pursed, not just her lips. And her hair is half-wet, half-dry, as she holds a hair drier in her hand.

“What?” she repeats calmly. “Couldn’t hear you.”

“Frying pan, have you seen it?”

A whir, a whoosh, a groan—all at once—loops itself into a sound loud enough to cancel out Bill’s words and Heather’s final ‘what?’. When Bill rises to her feet from her crouch by the kitchen cabinets she was inspecting, a literal police box has landed, halfway on their couch, halfway on the floor.

Heather drops the hair drier, prompting an orange mass of fur to dash out of her bedroom into the living room so quickly it’s hard to tell it’s a cat.

“I don’t think you’re going to need it…” Heather mumbles.

“What?” Bill says, entirely distracted by the TARDIS door, slowly being pushed open.

“The frying pan.”

“Oh, yeah…” she replies.

Blue wood scratches the floor, and the Doctor herself emerges in black and white out of the depths of the ship.

“ _This_ is why I don’t do flats…” she’s saying to her companion.

Once she’s hopped to stability, the Master descends gracefully out of the uneven dimension.

“Liar. You don’t _do_ flats because you never calibrate and therefore never land in the right spot while in flats.”

“As if that didn’t happen to you, too! We could have landed in _your_ TARDIS, but no, Mr. Perfect Landing didn’t want to _drive_ and parked outside instead _._ ”

Bill quickly glances out the window to find a mailbox out of place where before there’d been nothing but sidewalk. She can’t help but grin to herself.

“You don’t _drive_ a—” The Master swallows when he notices they’re being watched, because they are indeed not alone in such a tiny flat. “Never mind. Hi.”

Bill doesn’t have to think twice. Hell, she hardly thinks once. Weeks she’s waited, sleeping little, eating less, exhausting her time by researching impossible planets. Not thinking sometimes is good enough.

She lunges at the Doctor, practically crushing her at first, lifting her a little off the floor. The Doctor tries to act surprised, but she’s quick enough to melt in Bill’s embrace, quicker even to hug back. The two of them sway for a while, speechless and happy.

The Master watches, his hearts full of something luminous and light. Then a face from the past rubs his face against his ankle, and he supernovas. He picks up that orange cat faster than he could have spoken his name, and he does speak it.

“Arthur…” The Master kisses the cat’s forehead, knocks his nose against his, and lifts him close to his chest. “Arthur!”

The Doctor stifles a snort in the background, clearly free of her own hug now.

“What?” he complains. “I had to leave him here to go after you. Aren’t I allowed to miss him?”

“He… uh,” Heather says, still a little shocked by all this, “meowed like crazy the first few days. We think he missed you, too.”

“Awwwww….” The Master says, higher than normal. he kisses Arthur’s head again. The cat licks his nose in return. “Did you hear that? He _missed_ me.”

“You hated him, remember?” the Doctor says, very much enjoying this.

The Master shakes his head, proudly.

“Never did. Just pretended to. And you all—” He twirls in a most dramatic fashion, pointing his finger at her. “—just bought it.”

Bill laughs. He couldn’t possibly ever brace for her when she wraps him up in a tight hug as well, and stands on tiptoe to whisper in his ear the words that never, not once, did he expect to hear from a soul. Not even the Doctor.

“Thank you,” Bill says, stammering out old thoughts she didn’t think she’d have a chance to say, after so long. “There’s never been anyone on this Earth with a heart as good as yours.”

“I’m hardly the definition of ‘good’, dear…” he whispers back.

“You saved her,” Bill says, not understanding.

“One good deed doesn’t make a good man,” he tells her as he reminds himself.

“Then… what does?”

“The choice to try and act like one. Every day, for all good deeds.”

Bill hugs him tighter.

“That’s the Doctor, and that’s you. Making choices, fixing things. Passing by… Trying, just trying. And most times succeeding.”

He looks her in the eye, surprised. She doesn’t care, he realizes. Bill doesn’t care if he’s on a moral quest, struggling alongside it. All she sees is her friend, someone she loves and admires, doing his best. And she won’t stop loving him, admiring him, just because sometimes his best fails them all. After spending so long on Earth, the Master can vouch for that being one of humanity’s most endearing treats. Their stubbornness for love. And Bill’s, in particular.

“Had a lot of time to think about you guys,” Bill says, apologetically. “And to miss you, too.”

“Missed you too, kid,” he tells her.

Done with a conversation the other two have only perceived as a terribly long hug, the four of them push the TARDIS to the floor and sit all crammed on the couch, with Arthur standing on the coffee table, ready to be petted by all his friends, which they do, in copious amounts.

“Hey,” Heather thinks to ask after a while. “Did you name him after anybody?”

“Why?” Bill asks, holding back laughter.

“Uncommon name for a cat, Arthur.”

“All names are uncommon for cats. Cats don’t have names,” the Doctor pitches in. “And this one is not even a cat cat. Maybe his species _has_ names. I _really_ should get on that sometime soon…”

“We named him Arthur for King Arthur,” the Master replies, rolling his eyes at the infodumping, which he has so sorely missed all this time and cannot believe is really back. “You know, forever drowning in Lake Avalon till Britain’s time of greatest need and all that.”

Heather snorts.

“Seriously?”

“Yup,” Bill replies.

“ _Why?_ ”

“Oh, he fell into a pool, then sort of… rose, elegantly,” Bill says. “I thought of it.”

“And you named him Arthur,” Heather teases, “because a pool and a lake are similar enough, I guess?”

“What’s the difference between a pool and a lake, anyway?” the Master jokes. “The chlorine water?”

They laugh at this for a while, and at Heather’s list of names for cats that aren’t Arthur but honestly sound so much more ridiculous to everyone except to her and the Doctor.

“Are you taking him home now?” Heather asks when she’s finally managed to stop the pain in her cheeks from smiling so much.

“Um, yeah. It’s all going back to normal, I guess,” the Master says.

The Doctor smiles mysteriously.

“About that, fancy a coffee somewhere?” she asks.

“Sure.” Bill shrugs. “There’s a fantastic place around the corner.”

“Oh, we know. We’re kind of meeting someone there already. Well, we kind of already _did._ ” The Master pauses with a sly smile instead of explaining properly and points at the TARDIS. “How about a quick visit to the past?

* * *

_Bristol, 2015._

They said to come and she’s here, in a corner of a corner, waiting, despite the distance between Bristol and London, despite the inconvenience of traveling it just to sit in a coffeeshop.

At this point, she doesn’t expect the tell-tale of a TARDIS landing. In her life, the days in which she did aren’t that long gone. She could still get lost in the freshness of them, if she wished. But too much has happened since that Wednesday when the Doctor didn’t come for her and her world forgot how to spin.

A TARDIS does land across the street. She can’t hear it. She can’t hear them exit it, their smiles pulled back, their eyes giddy. But she watches, leg nervously twitching underneath the table she’s picked. Clara watches them even when they enter the coffee place, even when the Doctor’s entire body shifts from happiness to utter delight at the sight of her.

Clara stands up to hug her. She smells exactly like Clara remembered, like the stars turned ice cream.

“I never got to…” she begins, suddenly hot, suddenly at a loss, even though they told her they were coming. “Never got to thank you. Properly. Or at all.”

The Doctor kisses Clara’s cheek with the same fervor Clara used to kiss hers, way back when they were both younger, less free and yet entirely drawn to believing in their unending freedom.

“Oh, come on,” the Doctor says. “If it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have… Ah, what does it matter?” She grins one of her old daredevil grins. “You’re safe.”

She sits at the table, and the Master, Bill, and Heather follow. Around a hot cup of coffee, Clara is introduced to Heather by Bill, who has never looked happier to say this is the girlfriend she talked about that one time. Clara can’t help a tiny smile at the throwback moment and then a bigger one at how fascinatingly sweet it is that the lovebirds won’t stop holding hands when they talk about each other.

“Wait a sec,” the Doctor says, frowning. “How do you know Bill, again?”

“Oh, Bill used to be in my junior class in school,” Clara answers. “Right before I…”

The Doctor’s jaw drops. That’s one calculation she never considered.

“You need to be careful with all you know from the future, from _this_ Bill. Younger Bill can’t ever hear anything from you, not about this.”

Clara sighs.

“Yeah, I _know_ ,” she grumbles. “It’s not like she will ever see _Ms. Oswald_ again, she’s on her way to graduate now…”

She knew this was coming eventually. The Doctor loves, the Doctor says she trusts, the Doctor promises, but at the end of the day, the Doctor’s old and she falls for her own pitfalls over and over, no matter how many times you point them out for her to avoid next time. Clara just… hoped that she’d learned to see this one, to build a bridge over it.

Does it matter, like the Doctor said before, if they’re all safe and sound, and the day is new, not a drop of rain in sight?

Clara crosses her legs and leans her elbows on the table, wrapping her hands on her cup of coffee.

“So,” she says, “what are you lot going to do now?”

The Master glances at the Doctor, across from him.

“What we’ve always done, I suppose,” he says, smirking. “I’m chasing her across the stars as long as she’s still traveling them. Legend says I am very good and persistent at it.”

That gets a laugh out of everyone. Because they all know how true it is, historically or not.

“Yeah, maybe it’s time,” the Doctor says. She sits back on her chair and directs her wide, wide smile at Heather and Bill. “I did promise Bill stars once, never did deliver on that, did I? So what do you say? Bill Potts, fancy a trip in the box?”

The table is silent at the proposition. Scarcely made, and only to a few. The select few that get to enjoy it for so little. Truly so little, less than any of them ever realize. Clara knows it well, having turned it down once. The worth of forever in a box, the worth of forever in a day, holding the right hand. She still smiles encouragingly across the table at Bill, who is hearing the promise, the proposal, the proposition a second time, this time for real.

“Sign me up for that,” Bill manages to reply, her voice too steady for the shakiness of her fingers around the cup of coffee. “I want all of the trips in that box. Until morning, past morning. I want to see what the horizon never brings.”

“And get her a room,” Heather points out quietly. “It’s so unfair that she doesn’t have a room.”

It all escalates beautifully. Because, of course, the Doctor agrees. To a room, to stars and nebulas and corners of space no living person knows but her. She agrees even though, in her own words, now that the biggest threat is out, it’s still not entirely safe. But it will never be, so what’s the point in holding back? The Doctor goes as far as inviting Heather along, too, and Clara wonders how different her life might have been if she’d invited Danny Pink aboard the TARDIS from day one, too. She wonders if he too, like Heather, would have declined on the basis that he likes Earth too much. Even the Master, quietly drinking his coffee, nods in solemnity, like he understands all too well what Heather means.

Then, in the silence, Clara feels the Doctor’s eyes on her with the carefulness she hardly ever practices.

“Room for one more,” the Doctor says. “Will you come with me again? The Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS.”

Clara blushes.

“You have Bill now, you don’t need _me…”_ she stammers out cheerfully. As cheerfully as she can.

“I also have a whole dimension. Always room for more,” the Doctor insists, entirely serious now. “Always room for running, staying, or not doing anything at all.”

“My, you’ve changed.” Clara smiles a dimpled smile.

The Doctor doesn’t return it, not yet. The Doctor shrugs.

“I forgot some things I shouldn’t, some things I love. I know the worth of having them back,” the Doctor says, focused and calm on a feeling she now knows how to name. “I want to treasure them while I still can. Until the end of time.”

And, because they’ve all been around the Doctor long enough now, all of them say it at the same time, unable not to laugh before, during, and later:

“Even after!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before I go, I just wanted to leave here the few thoughts that I originally outlined for the very last paragraph of the series and that, sadly, never made it in. 
> 
> I intended to end it similarly to the epilogue of _Silence_ , with the idea that they have so much time ahead of them. But… it got me thinking, and I realized, isn’t that a bit true of the promise—that damn promise they keep making each other—as well? That no matter what, they’ll be there, to try again, to start fresh, to pick up where they left off… now and when all the stars have gone cold?
> 
> After all, that promise _is_ my favorite theme in the entire series. Not a bad place to end it, I suppose <3\. 
> 
> Thank you for reading. «Keep your faith. Travel hopefully. The universe'll surprise you... constantly.»

**Author's Note:**

> This prologue has no music associated with it, but starting with the next update, I’ll be adding new songs to [the series playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7nGKBLdSNYNJNZc4tH8TQi)!


End file.
